How Casino Royale Reworked A Tragic Plotline From James Bond's Past

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The Daniel Craig era of James Bond changed up the many decades-long film series in a number of different ways. Most notably was its tonal shift, steering further away from the goofier and campier elements of the series that the "Austin Powers" trilogy had so much fun lampooning. After all, once you make "Die Another Day," the only direction you can go is a more grounded one. But there had been serious James Bond films before, such as the earliest Sean Connery films or the Timothy Dalton era. The bigger change the Craig films made was taking a page out of the modern franchise booklet, and that was serialization.

The first 20 James Bond films may have brought actors and filmmakers over from one film to another, but the plots of those films rarely carried over. Part of the pleasure of Bond was that he received a new mission at the beginning of every film, which then saw him carry it out. The behaviors that would show up from film to film, like Bond flirting with Moneypenny, were character quirks and not things that would build over the course of the series. Considering this was an ongoing series with no end in sight, this method allowed anyone at any time to jump into the next movie without worrying about catching up on anything.

Well, there was one story element they attempted to track through the series to mixed results, and that was Bond's grief from the murder of his wife Tracy in "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." While an extremely effective moment in and of itself, the lingering effects of that unfortunate event make themselves known in subsequent films in fits and starts, and the Craig era of Bond would be able to handle this kind of tragedy far better in its own way.

How much of how little the subsequent films would acknowledge Tracy Bond was always up for debate. In the book "Nobody Does It Better: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of James Bond" by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, the screenwriter for most of the pre-Craig Bond pictures, Richard Maibaum, said of the Tracy references, "I would have liked to see more of it threaded through the pictures. But the tone of the pictures was different in the middle part of the saga." As the films continued to get sillier, bringing in authentic trauma from a murdered loved one would only serve one purpose: killing the fun of the movie. You can't have a grief-stricken, brooding Bond in a movie where a pigeon does a double take or the villain blows up like a balloon.

The further the series went along, the tougher it was to point back to Tracy. As much as they would like for us to think this is one continuous timeline, the actual timeline of the world makes that difficult. Michael France, co-writer of 1995's "GodenEye," initially wanted to reference her but ultimately couldn't justify it:

"There's a moment in 'GoldenEye' when Alec Travelyan comments on whether or not all those vodka martinis drown out the sound of all the women Bond couldn't save. The first version of that line was to the woman he couldn't protect, meaning Tracy. I would have loved for that to go in, but I guess it gets a little tricky to keep referring back to a movie that, then, was from 25 years earlier."

Frankly, the lack of serious serialization was always going to prevent her memory from ever landing the way they hoped. For the film she was in, it worked. That's all they needed.