Jeffrey Overstreet says he is “getting unsettled by Karen Allen’s perpetual, ear-to-ear grin in the promotional shots for Indy 4 . . . I hope Marion Ravenwood’s return to the Indy world will remind us of the tough-talking, punch-throwing dream girl who won our hearts in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Marion gone soft and smiley? Say it isn’t so!”
Variety and the Associated Press do their best to assure him and all who share his fear that, if anything, Marion is even tougher this time out. As Karen Allen, the actress who plays Marion, tells Variety: “She’s now become somebody who takes charge of things and is not so easily thrown into a bed of snakes. She’s somebody who sees what needs to be done and can do it. And that’s lovely.”
Allen also tells the Associated Press: “As the film begins, they haven’t seen each other for a long time, and suddenly, they’re thrust back together . . . They kind of pick up from where they left off. A few bumpy roads have passed between them since then that they have to work out with each other.”
That’s an intriguing quote, partly because we don’t really know where Indy and Marion left off, exactly. They were together at the end of Raiders, in 1936, but they had obviously split up again by the time Indy fell for that Nazi double agent in Last Crusade, in 1938. So how, exactly, did they break up the second time? (The first time they broke up was in 1926, when Marion was a child, and she was in love, and it was wrong and Indy knew it.)
This is an issue the James Bond stories have never had to deal with, since Bond never dates the same girl twice — though at least some of the Bond novels have begun by explaining how things fell apart for Bond and the girl from the previous book. But as far as the Bond movies are concerned, if I’m not mistaken, the only time they have ever referred to his past lovers is when they died in the film that introduced them. Several films have referred to the death of Bond’s wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969), and it looks like the next Bond film, Quantum of Solace, will partly concern Bond’s quest for revenge following the death of Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale (2006). But if a Bond girl makes it to the end of a Bond movie alive, it’s usually a sure sign that she’ll be completely forgotten by the time the next movie comes along.
And if memory serves, it has only happened once so far that a Bond girl was introduced as a figure from Bond’s own past — and that was with the Teri Hatcher character in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), who died almost as soon as she was introduced, and was never mentioned again in any of the films that followed.
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