The Battle of Algiers Review

Pontecorvo had to put a title card on the front swearing that not one frame of newsreel was used, because nobody believed him. Marcello Gatti shot on coarse stock, blew it up, printed it down and produced an image that looks scraped off a wire service machine, and the technique has been copied so often since that the film's real achievement is easy to miss. Almost the entire cast is non professional. Brahim Hadjadj, who plays the petty thief Ali La Pointe, had never acted. Saadi Yacef, who had actually commanded the FLN in the Casbah, produced the picture and plays a version of himself.

The famous sequence is still the three women at the mirror, cutting their hair, changing into European clothes and carrying baskets through the checkpoints to the milk bar and the air terminal. Pontecorvo holds on the faces of the people about to be killed just long enough that you cannot file the bombing away as tactics. He then does the same favour to the paratroopers. Jean Martin's Colonel Mathieu is the one professional actor in the front rank and the film's sharpest idea: a cultured anti fascist resistance veteran who explains torture in the calm register of a man solving a logistics problem, and who is allowed to be right about the arithmetic.

France kept it out of cinemas until 1971. The Pentagon screened it for commanders in August 2003 under a flyer asking how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. Both facts are useful, because neither side has ever been able to claim the film. The Golden Lion and three Oscar nominations understate it.