INTERESTING women in crime films have always been an endangered species. When not playing gangster’s molls, women tend to be victims. The most important qualifications for this role, apart from possession of a nubile and bloodied body, are huge eyes to register terror and huge lungs for screaming. Red Riding Hood’s grandmother would have fitted the bill a treat.

When they escape the victim straitjacket, they’re often — oh, groaning cliché — feisty. In Hollywood terms, this usually means a woman too stupid to respond plausibly in the kind of situation which would have any sane person passing out with fear.

There are welcome exceptions, of course. Towards the end of the mostly implausible Silence of the Lambs, Jodie Foster’s tough cookie cop is quite reasonably petrified as she confronts the skin-stitching psychotic predator. Her hand shakes so violently it might be a pneumatic drill in her hand, not a gun.

If real bravery is overcoming fear, rather than the absence of fear, then Clarice Starling won hands down — or hands all over the place, as it were. The best kind of feisty.

Also top of the female cops is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) in the Coen brothers’ Fargo. Without her, this would be just a kidnap-gone-wrong caper with a high and gory mortality rate. But the Oscar-winning McDormand upsets all our expectations and makes it a great film.

We see police chief Marge in bed with Norm, her duck-painting, ice-fishing chubster of a husband. She’s encased in a nightdress that looks as if it’s been stitched from a set of curtains that weren’t up to much in the first place. She later accessorises this remarkable garment with a cardigan that was quite possibly knitted from seaweed. So not exactly glamorous, then.

She also eats frequently, is very pregnant and says “Ya” a lot (the film is set in the state of North Dakota. Apparently everyone speaks a bit like Pingu in North Dakota). She also takes her time. Sometimes she just stares.

When she is first investigating the murder scene, she suddenly bends double. “Did you find something there, chief?” her deputy asks.

“No,” she says, still upside down and staring at the snow. “I think I’m going to barf — morning sickness.”

Five minutes later and she’s hungry again. But she is intelligent, compassionate and persistent and she gets her man, even though he’s feeding his eighth victim into a wood chipper at the time. Law and order are restored to her patch. Oh yes, and she’s beautiful, in spite of the recycled curtains. A real heroine. Probably born feisty.

Pregnant women fit well in the crime genre, actually. It must be the new life quietly burgeoning among all that murder and mayhem, the creative female counterpoint to the male penchant for bringing life to a violent end. In Traffic Catherine Zeta-Jones is a drug baron’s wife who takes over his business when he’s unexpectedly removed from the action by the police. The fact that she is pregnant increases her perverse heroism — she’s risking her life to safeguard the prospects of her unborn child. But it also magnifies her culpability — she’s risking not only her own skin, but that of the child. Being pregnant raises the stakes.

So does motherhood. Ashley Judd’s determination to be reunited with her son after being wrongly accused of her husband’s murder in Double Jeopardy turns her from “nice” wife to renegade. She escapes from a sinking car when handcuffed to the door handle, shoots her way out of a locked coffin and outwits pursuers from both sides of the law. It is hardly the most realistic film ever made, but you’re rooting for her all the way as she transforms herself from victim to avenger on the side of right.

Then there are the victims turned feisty bad girls. Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis set the trend in 1991 with Thelma and Louise, about two smalltown losers who kill a bully, then take to the road. But they end up driving off a cliff — a way of evading arrest that might best be described as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Far more satisfying is the — basically true — story of Aileen Wuornos (Charlize Theron) in Monster. Wuornos was a hooker, but not the Julia Roberts Pretty Woman sort. In Patty Jenkins’s film, as in real life, she expects nothing and gets even less, until she meets the runaway Selby (Christina Ricci). Discovering tenderness, she also finds a fledgeling self-respect, so that when a punter turns violent she explodes with rage and shoots him.

She’s unleashed her power, and goes on to kill again. And again (the real Wuornos was executed after seven murders). Finally she murders a kindly man, the Good Samaritan who has wandered into her life far too late.

Aileen is capable of terrible violence, but she also finds a kind of redemption when she forgives Selby, who has betrayed her to save her own skin. I’ve no idea if the real Wuornos was as grandly great and terrible as the movie one, but I hope she was.

Her mirror image is the weird Frannie Avery in Jane Campion’s film, In the Cut. Frannie (Meg Ryan) is intelligent — academic, anyway — independent and attractive. She seems to have it made. But she is attracted to a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who may have a predilection for carving up women before he kills them.

Aileen Wuornos would have known how to handle him, but Frannie is strangely paralysed. This is either a very brave look at women’s masochistic sexual fantasies or an extremely perverse film for the brilliant Jane Campion to spend her time on. My personal jury is still out on that one.

No problems with the verdict on Roxie Hart (Ginger Rogers), eponymous star of the film which was later rejigged as Chicago. Forget the tawdry 2002 remake with Renée Zellweger and Catherine Zeta-Jones (no longer pregnant but high-kicking her waistline back into shape).

The 1942 version has wit, pace and a luminously goofy, gum-chewing heroine. It’s worth watching just for her tap-dance routine on the prison’s metal spiral staircase.

Definitely glamourous, Roxie Hart is neither feisty nor a victim. Nor, it has to be said, is she totally believable. But she is funny and beautiful — and she emerges triumphant from her brush with the law. What more could one want?

• Joanna Hines’s Angels of the Flood, a psychological thriller, will be published by Pocket Books in August

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