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Lean Harvest is the latest hit imported from London. To judge by this piece and other recent successes like Rope's End and Payment Deferred, the English are a grim lot.
The product of Ronald Jeans, Lean Harvest is concerned with the rise & fall of Nigel Trent (Leslie Banks), who evidently never heard the story about Lazarus at the Rich Man's gate or how hard it is for a camel to get through the needle's eye. Resolutely he sets out to make his fortune, so resolutely that he leaves his first love in the lurch. From this lurch his hackwriting brother Steven rescues her and marries her, while Nigel begins mak-ing a name for himself in the City. Then Nigel marries Celia (Vera Allen), meets one of the drollest men that ever cadged a Martini, Philip Downes (Nigel Bruce).
Nigel grows prematurely older, assumes a sturdy financial stodginess, loses contact with his wife whom he loves, becomes Sir Nigel and acquires several hundred thousand pounds worth of the root-of-all-evil. One night his sensitive and poiseful wife gives a big party. Tired and worried, he is cornered by an enthusiastic fanatic (Paula Bauersmith) whose palaver about people's auras bores him infinitely. It is at the close of this party that his wife decides to run away with jolly Actor Bruce. Then her husband suffers a stroke, dies in the delirium, shouts, jangles and discords of an overworked mind. The sermon of Playwright Jeans is delivered in the closing moments of the play when it is indicated that impoverished Brother Steven & wife are about to let Nigel's money, which they have inherited, wreck them too.