On April 8th, Jane Bryan passed away at age 90.  Bryan retired from the screen in 1940, but fans of Warner Brothers flicks of the late 1930s surely remember Bryan as an uncommonly talented ingenue, an actress who could be memorable in the kinds of roles that so often went unnoticed.  She played featured parts in two of my favorite WB soaps, Confession (1937), in which she played Kay Francis’ daughter, and The Old Maid (1939), in which she played Bette Davis’ secret love child, growing up to believe that Davis is her severe aunt.  

Confession is a Madame X-style melodrama, expertly served by director Joe May.  It is one of Kay Francis’ most accomplished pictures, stylish and affecting and great-looking (with Expressionist touches in the design).  Francis moves from opera star to wife/mother to scandal/divorce (thanks to one drunken sexual indiscretion) to supporting herself in cheap cabaret.  Basil Rathbone is the womanizing slime who ruins her and then goes after her daughter (Miss Bryan).  There’s a sublime final sequence, ending with Kay’s walk to what appears to be an Art Deco prison.

The Old Maid begins as a Civil War-era love triangle, with Miriam Hopkins and George Brent alongside Bette Davis.  Brent dies in the war, leaving the unwed Davis pregnant with his child, infuriating Hopkins (Davis’ cousin as well as rival.)  Davis’ daughter, Jane Bryan, is raised by both Davis and Hopkins; she believes that she was a foundling.  The delicious masochism is heightened by Davis’ forced coldness, a tactic designed to keep Bryan from ever suspecting the truth.  Bryan gives a colorful and feisty performance, and Davis is a marvel, at her peak (in the year of Dark Victory and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex) and making dazzling transitions as she ages decades.

Though few movie watchers would be able to identify Jane Bryan, they would surely be able to say, “Who’s that kid with all the talent?”