Last night I went to see what I thought was Clint Eastwood's American pendant to his at once nuanced and stirring movie, Letters from Iwo Jima (which I hope wins the Academy Award for Best Picture.) The film I thought I was going to see was Flags of Our Fathers. But what I actually saw was Days of Glory. No, not that other Days of Glory with Gregory Peck and made in 1944. Yet there are some similarities. Both are about soldiers fighting the Nazis. The Peck drama centered on Russian partisans resisting the German occupation of the Motherland. Frankly, it was sheer agitprop; and you have to remind yourself that is wasn't written by Lillian Hellman--though she might have vetted it for ideological errors. After all, she was the Stalinism commissar in Hollywood and on Broadway. In any case, the Days of Glory that I did see is an Algerian film, the director of which is Rachid Bouchareb, a truly lustrous director, and lustrous out of a grim story, on crusty landscape and through hazardous moral terrain. This production has an Academy nomination for the best foreign film, and it would be quite just if it won. After all, justice was not accorded the real stars of the piece, the actual historical actors--North African Arabs and others from a bit deeper south into the continent--who fought under the French flag and French commanders in occupied France against the Nazis. Watching the film--and listening to its evocative sounds in song-- can sear your spirit. Any military unit has its smart soldiers and its dumb ones, its coarse ones and noble ones. This unit, too. But it also carries heavily on its character the burdens of history, of French rule disguised as la patrie, of colonialism, racism, false honor, men's courage . Kindness is diminished by pride and sometimes rancor is enhanced by fraternity. Do not miss this film. Do not. There are still some historical questions. Why did these oppressed Algerians going off to war so cheerily? Was French racism as blatant and brutal as it seems here? There are two conclusions that may be tentatively drawn from the movie, and they are their own questions. Less than a decade after the liberation of France, there was a war for control of Algeria, a long war, "A Savage War of Peace," as Alistair Horne called it in his gripping narrative history. Both sides used terror, and France lost. Since the second liberation, a civil war has been waged in Algeria -sometimes ferocious, sometimes lapidary- between the military nationalists and the Islamist fanatics. Another "cry, the beloved country." Was the ferocity an outgrowth of the resentment of the Algerian recruits' experience in the French army? And what about "la banlieue chaude?" The first Algerians to come to France after 1962 were mostly those who were vulnerable because they had served la patrie during the "liberation" war. During the last 40 years, the Algerians just came and came ... and came some more. They did not immigrate to la patrie. They came for a better life and, ironically, to a place where it is easier to practice a stark and oppressive Islam than in Algeria. Was this migration in some subtle sense a continuation of the both wars of liberation?