The Great Movies III

The Battle of Algiers is "a training film for urban guerrillas," Jimmy Breslin declared on TV in 1968. Certainly it was shown by the Black Panthers and the IRA to their members, and in September 2003 the New York Times reported that the movie was being shown in the Pentagon to military and civilian experts. Times reporter Michael Kaufman wrote that Pentagon audiences were "urged to consider and discuss the implicit issues at the core of the film-the problematic but alluring efficacy of brutal and repressive means in fighting clandestine terrorists in places like Algeria and Iraq." In short, the possibilities of torture.

Pontecorvo's film was released at the peak of antiwar sentiment in the United States, and had a surprising box-office success; it played for fourteen weeks in Chicago. It was described at the time as "impartial," alternating between the stories of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and the French police and paratroopers assigned to destroy it. "Pontecorvo has taken his stance," I wrote in my 1968 review, "somewhere between the FLN and the French, although his sympathies are on the side of the Nationalists. He is aware that innocent civilians die and are tortured on both sides, that bombs cannot choose their victims, that both armies have heroes, and that everyone fighting a war can supply rational arguments to prove he is on the side of morality."

True up to a point. But watching the movie again on the new Criterion DVD, I believe Pontecorvo's sympathies were clearly with the FLN. The resistance opens with FLN members walking up to French policemen in the street and shooting them dead, often in the back. Bombs are used against police strongholds. These actions are seen in silence, but when the French respond by blowing up the home of a terrorist, the score by Ennio Morricone becomes mournful as survivors pick through the debris. His score withholds sympathy for the dead police.

Pontecorvo does, however, show the French leadership in a relatively objective light. In a film that was cast almost entirely with local non-actors, he uses the Paris stage veteran Jean Martin to play Colonel Mathieu, commander of paratroopers sent in to back up the police. Mathieu, himself a member of the French resistance to the Nazis, later a veteran of the French defeat in Indochina, knows a thing or two about urban warfare. He is calm, analytical, strategic in his thinking, and considers the FLN to be the enemy, not a malevolent force. As French public opinion turns against the war, he is besieged by reporters, one of whom quotes the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre.

"Why are the Sartres always born on the other side?" Colonel Mathieu complains.

"You like Sartre?" asks a journalist.

"No, but I like him even less as an enemy."

Pontecorvo's film remains even today a triumph of realistic production values. Filming on location in Algiers, using the real locations in the European quarter and the Casbah (which sheltered the FLN), he achieved such a convincing actuality that he found it necessary to issue a disclaimer: there is "not one foot" of documentary or newsreel footage in his two hours of film. Everything was shot live, even riot scenes in which police battle civilian demonstrators.

He cuts back and forth between Colonel Mathieu and other military and civilian leaders and a raggedy band of FLN fighters, of which the key figure may be Ali la Pointe (Braham Haggiag), a reform-school boy and professional criminal who converts to the FLN after witnessing a beheading in prison. Back on the streets, Ali receives instructions (carried by a small boy) to shoot a policeman who meets daily with an Algerian informer. A woman standing outside a cafe will hand him a gun.

Ali finds the cafe, the policeman, the woman, and the gun, but when he pulls the trigger, the gun is not loaded. He feels betrayed by the FLN, but the woman takes him to her contact, who explains the reasoning: they did not know if they could trust him. Ali might have been recruited by the French in prison. The reason they told him to shoot the cop instead of the informer is that, if he were a police stooge, the police wouldn't object to the murder of a civilian, but they wouldn't let an informer shoot a French policeman. By pulling the trigger, Ali has symbolically committed a murder, earning his entry into the FLN.