opening secure urls

i'm needing to be able to open secure sites (https) from php. according to the manual, i need to use curl. i've already downloaded curl, compiled it, and installed it. looking through the ./configure --help for php4 doesn't seem to reveal anything about using curl. but i went by the manual and tried the --with-curl option on there anyway. php doesn't seem to compile any differently than before and none of the curl functions are recognized. are these built in to php4 under different names or am i not doing something right with curl? -jr