Does Princess Leia strangling Jabba the Hutt with her chains count?
If feel this particular moment from Mulhollands Super Stupor is entirely appropriate. http://www.superstupor.com/sust12272007.shtml
Speaking of Xena, Gabrielle escaping from the cyclops should certainly count.
Nah. It was established in the first movie that Leia was one tough cookie.
I was thinking of Elle when I began the thread. I didn’t list her because she didn’t quite escape; she got out of the building she was being held in, only to be caught again by the thug she’d manipulated. But then the FBI showed up to finish the rescue.
And yes, Elle is made of awesome.
Nope. That wasn’t accomplished through trickery on her part.
Beat ya to it by thirty posts. 
Grabbing the gun from Han and blasting them an escape route during her botched rescue attempt might count, though.
That’s not exactly guile. That’s the intelligent application of brute force.
Sharon Fields, the female protagonist of Irving Wallace’s “The Fan Club” is definitely a winner for this trope. She’s a beautiful Hollywood movie star who came up rough, through the streets. A group of obsessed male fans of hers, believing PR stories about what a sexual dynamo she is, decide to kidnap her and get themselves some of that sexual dynamism. But she skillfully plays them off against one another and uses trickery to enable the cops to learn where to find her. She and the only member of the ‘fan club’ who didn’t rape her are the only ones who survive.
Interesting bit of trivia: at the time Wallace wrote “The Fan Club” every book he wrote was being made into a movie. But the studios backed off on this one, in part because the real life kidnapping and murder of Dana Plato by an obsessed fan led to fears that a movie based on the book might lead to copycat crimes.
Miller, so you did 
That’ll teach me to check every link.
Just thought of another instance of a damsel freeing herself, not so much through trickery as taking advantage of an incompetent villain. Kristin Davis, best known for her work as Amanda in “Sex and the City,” stars as Babette Watson, a psychic waitress abducted by a moronic serial killer in Murder in Mind, which is basically a Lifetime Channel potboiler. The villain kidnaps her, then duct tapes her to a chair and gags her. But he ties her hands in front of her with the duct tape. Babette uses her psychic powers to alert the hero that she’s officially a damsel in distress, and when he comes to rescue her, a struggle ensues, the villain having anticipated his rescue attempt. The hero’s gun is knocked away by the villain and after much fighting, he stabs the hero unconscious. While they’re fighting, Babette frees herself from the chair and crawls over to the gun, and as the villain rises after his victory over the hero, she shoots him dead. She’s very much her own rescuer as her boyfriend totally failed at rescuing her … though if she’d thought to remove her gag (something she could easily have done) and warn the hero that the villain was going to attack, the hero might have been considerably less stabbed.
I will pay you $786,384,291 to never mention this movie, or any other Lifetime network movie, ever again.
Who said you can’t make money by posting (or not posting) on message boards? Done!