CELESTIAL ESCAPADE

Light in tone, but with more ballast in content than you might expect, is this comedy of manners, of the winter of '49 in Hong Kong, before the Communists came to Shanghai. There is Trixie, Eurasian, spoiling for an insult, cocky because she is ""white"" Ralph Goswell's pampered mistress; Dottie Goswell, whose stroke leaves her out of the picture -- and yet something of a victor; Ralph, whose business success is threatened by Trixie's voluntary (and involuntary) ability to create trouble; Ralph's sons who trail the situation into a crisis for Ralph's life; assorted foreigners who highlight the events in flux...And there is the flight to Shanghai, to sniff out the future, to save shekels and skin -- and to come a cropper, for Ralph, with his younger son and his own dignity; for Trixie, found in bed with another, the chance to break clean from her past. Persons with a price are bitingly portrayed against a knowing, foreign background of current events.