Blue Steel is a 1990 American action thriller film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Ron Silver and Clancy Brown. The film presents a harrowing deconstruction of male gaze, misogyny at both psychological and institutional levels, and the terrors of urban womanhood in the late 20th Century; through the experience of a New York police officer who shoots and kills an armed criminal on her first day of active duty - only for a witness of the incident to steal the criminal's weapon and begin tormenting her life as the object of a homicidal obsession.