We end our program today with... a little time travel.

The year is 1936. The place is Paris. The means is a new movie that harkens back to the golden age of French cinema. The World's Adeline Sire tells us about "Paris 36."

Adeline Sire: Ahhhhhhhhh PARIS, the narrow streets and stairways, laundry at the windows, bicycles, accordions and berets. That's the Paris that now exists only in movies-- and on movie sets in the Czech Republic by the way. "Paris 36' is all that, plus music. At the center of the story is a Vaudeville theater called the Chansonia, and the people who run it. That includes the barker hawking the show out on the sidewalk.

There's labor unrest at the theater as in all of France at the time. And there's a new owner who's hostile to the workers. We'll get to that in a minute, but what grabs you right away is the rich cinematography and sets, the period costumes.... And the music. Many of the songs are performed by a young ingenue named Douce. She's played by a remarkable newcomer Nora Arnezeder.

Problem is, it feels a lot like deja vu.

Lisa Nesselson: We are probably dealing with a sort of collective postcard notion of what France might be like.

Lisa Nesselson is a Paris-based critic for the British film magazine "Screen International."

Lisa Nesselson: It's a very strange exercise in this day and age to revisit the golden age of French film making which has well and truly swept so the director set out to resuscitate something that is no more but he hasn't given it a post-modern or ironic approach so you can be sitting in front of it and scratching your head and going now let me get this straight they got the money together, the cast fit, they got all these and they're doing something that for all intents and purposes has already been done.

Director Christophe Barratier agrees it's been done before and makes no apologies for it.

Christophe Barratier: I love history, I love the movies of this period, you know it was a fantastic period for the French cinema, between 35 and 40, I like the sets, and travelling in time.

Traveling in time to Paris in 1936 means heading straight into a massive social movement. France's first left-wing government, the Front Populaire, was elected that year and was quickly confronted with nationwide strikes. This resulted in life-changing concessions for workers: a 40-hour work week and the right to 3 weeks paid leave. That was the first time ordinary folks were able to take time off and head for the sea. That's the theme of the most lavish number in the film "Partir pour la mer."

"Paris 36" was originally conceived by lyricist Frank Thomas and composer Reinhardt Wagner as a musical for the FRENCH stage. That did not happen. But director Christophe Barratier had a cinematic vision for it, and it was based in part on AMERICAN musicals.

Christophe Barratier: It's like a Broadway show, really inspired by the Busby Berkley form, like “Footlight Parade” with James Cagney, you know you begin a song on stage, and then you forget the stage, and you go in a part of fantasy in 4th dimension and you are out of the audience and you come back, that was inspired much more by American movies than by French movies.

"One line in the "Heading for the Sea" number focuses on the joys of driving at full speed."

The lyrics roughly say "25 miles an hour, now THAT's the speed of happiness!"

That kind of jolliness may be just what American audiences are in the mood for right now.

For The World, I'm Adeline Sire