Terror. The Mideast learned the efficacy of insurgent terror from Algeria. The PLO, Hamas, and other groups are indebted to the Algerian strategy of so-called "people's war." Its lessons are now apparent in Iraq, too. Yet the film treats the Algiers terror campaign as a failure: its later bombings and shootings are made to appear increasingly desperate and strategically pointless. "Wars aren't won with terrorism," says one key revolutionary. "Neither wars nor revolutions." But that depends at least in part on how the other side reacts to terror, whether the other side is France in Algeria or the United States in Iraq. Wars may not be won with terror, but they can be lost by reacting ineffectively to it.

When Gillo Pontecorvo heard that the Pentagon had organized a screening of his 1965 film "The Battle of Algiers" for a group of military and civilian experts last summer, he said he found it a "little strange." If anything, he conceded, his movie about the bloody uprisings that led to Algeria's eventual independence from France in 1962 was useful to "give an idea of the horror of the situation," not necessarily to teach Guerrilla Warfare 101 to a roomful of strategists pondering the current war in Iraq.

"I don't think that any film can teach anything," Pontecorvo said. "I think that the most that 'The Battle of Algiers' can do is teach how to make cinema, not war." The Pentagon viewing—to which participants were invited via a flier declaring, "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas"—came a few months before the re-release of the film in a new 35mm print. "Perhaps the reason they've dusted it off is Iraq," Pontecorvo said in an interview in his Rome apartment. "But action and love always work in the movies. They never get old and this is above all an action film."