[Kate]He’s a culchuud Frrenchman, I’m a little !hick![/Kate]
Allow me to be the first to say, “Yes, it worked.” It was a very interesting, well done reinterpretation of the role. She didn’t even try to play an ingenue, but instead came across as the “type” of the fifty-something innocent, which worked. Also, I thought the older couple that resulted contrasted nicely with the younger Joe Cable/Liat pairing.
I never did quite “get” a sophisticated Frenchman going for a bubbly teenage hick, anyway, unless as breeding stock. 
The “still an ensign at age 54” thing that somebody said earlier turned out not to signify, as it was immediately obvious, once you got into the story, that this was an older woman who had signed up as a Navy nurse to do her bit for the war effort and, incidentally, to see a little more of the world besides Little Rock.
And the “how can a fifty-something act shocked to find out that he has two colored kids” actually worked, because she’d been presented as rather innocent. Suddenly you could see that Little Rock wasn’t so far away after all, even if she was old enough to know better. When she said to him, “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I feel the way I do, I can’t help it,” it had a completely different resonance when spoken by an older woman than when spoken by an 18-year-old.
They did leave in the lyric about “someone young and smiling, walking up my hill”, but it kinda worked, too.
So, well done.
However, IMO it’s still not the “definitive” screen version, but for a TV-movie, it was pretty good.
But don’t waste your money on the sound track unless you’re really nuts about Rodgers & Hammerstein. The singing was OK, but as I said, not the definitive version.
She’s just trying to make up for Hamlet, when she played Mel Gibson’s mother. Looked like she was about twelve minutes older than he was.
I realize Mary Martin was 40 when SHE did it but the folks in the back and balconies couldn’t SEE that.
BTW----does anyone here know who did the singing for JOHN KERR in the feature version? I’ve always wondered.