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   When I teach film, I show Going’ Hollywood in the ‘30s because it laments the passing of the Golden Age of Hollywood for the lack of women stars and the lack of the really good roles for women. There’s truth to that observation and maybe, just maybe, good roles for women are coming back. By good roles, I mean complex leading roles portraying not just good girls but also bad girls because bad girls made many a Golden Age movie star.

   Playing the bad girl or rather very strong and complex characters made the talented actress Bette Davis a big star. Three recent films have roles for women that Bette Davis might have wanted.

   In The Mummy, Sofia Boutella’s role as the antagonist Ahmanet is the type of role Bette Davis would wanted to play although Davis would have insisted that Ahmanet’s motivation for her anger and the actions which cause her to be entombed as a form of eternal punishment had been further developed. The script did give Boutella a solid structure for her character’s motivation.

   Although once anointed to be the next and firs female pharaoh, Ahmanet’s throne is stolen when her father’s new wife delivers a male heir. Ahmanet kills her half brother and stepmother to maintain her path to the throne and is punished for it by eternal damnation and imprisonment. Before getting judgmental, remember dynastic monarchies the world over are littered with bodies for similar and lessor reasons.

The other important woman character in The Mummy, Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), although not a Polly Purebred type, is really only there for Nick Morton, (Tom Cruise, who looks like he’s been regenerated by some weird magic) to fall in love with and to save.

   On the other end of the spectrum, D.C. Comic’s Wonder Woman reboot offers a heroine and a powerful, slightly complex protagonist. In this film based on the popular comic book character, Gal Gadot plays Diana aka Wonder Woman. She has motivation for her desire to end WWI although it has an element of youthful idealism over personal concerns.

  Diana does eventually gain some insight into real life and true love, which makes her character more interesting. Certainly, Davis would have love portraying that kind of character growth. Davis would have also insisted that Diana’s costumes not be so unrealistic and clearly just for men to gape at her body.

The title role in Megan Leavey (Kate Mara) is the recent role I can see Bette Davis fighting to play almost as much as she did to play Scarlett O’Hara, which she didn’t get. Megan Leavey, who can’t connect with other people since her best friend died. She is deeply flawed and troubled when she gets the idea to join the Marines to straighten herself out.

   The decision isn’t welcomed by her parents, and she’s initially not very good at being a soldier. Then, she gets in trouble and ends up doing grunt work in the bomb-sniffing dog facility. Eventually, she becomes the handler for a supposedly difficult military dog name Max. Their tour of duty in Iraq changes Megan Leavey, and the hardest moment is when she can’t take Max home with her because he is deemed unadoptable and sent back to front.

   Megan also looses her one human relationship that offers her redemption and normal life when Matt Morales (Ramon Rodriguez), her friend, follow bomb dog handler, and lover, re-ups and is shipped back to Iraq. Desperate to get Max back, Megan listens to her father for the first time in years and starts a campaign to adopt Max before he is euthanized at the end of his tour.

Bette Davis may have fought for the characters she played and way they were represented in movie because she wanted to play those kind of roles; however, she also provide role models for an entire generation of women. Davis show that, good or bad, women where strong, resourceful, and powerful and that they had as much a sense of injustice, history, idealism, and justice as the characters Ahmanet, Diana, and Megan Leavey.

   Hopefully, the young stars today can learn to stand up for the characters they play and for how women are portrayed on film. They will need to understand story, scripts, and characters as well as Bette Davis did. The Mummy, Wonder Woman, and Megan Leavey, which was recently the Movie of the Week pick by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, are in theaters now and worth seeing.