I decided to watch ‘Blue Steel‘ due to the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis in the cast and the fact that it is directed by Kathryn Bigelow. The film was released on screens in 1990, when Curtis was already a well-known star (2 x ‘Halloween‘, but especially ‘A Fish Called Wanda‘). Bigelow was still at the beginning of her career, and it would be nearly two decades before she met his glory and the Academy Awards. It is always fascinating to see the early films of interesting and successful directors. The search for signs that indicate talent and the future evolution gives results in this film, even if from many other points of view this movie is not one of the best. Curtis and Bigelow were and remain the main reasons why this film deserved to be seen 30 years ago and deserves to be viewed or reviewed today.
The whole story is built around the image of Jamie Lee Curtis in the role of the beautiful policewoman Megan Turner dressed in the famous NYPD blue uniform. On her first day on the job, while patrolling the streets of Manhattan, the recent graduate of the police academy finds herself in a hold-up situation in a supermarket and kills an armed burglar. Bad luck causes the criminal’s gun to disappear from the scene and fall into the hands of Eugene Hunt (Ron Silver), a white collar psychopath (a stockbroker of all professions) whose obsessive passion for the young police officer in uniform will urge him to commit crimes on the streets of the metropolis and to intrude into her personal life.
Two years before Paul Verhoeven‘s ‘Basic Instinct‘, Kathryn Bigelow creates a psychological thriller with an erotic touch, in which the boundaries between the personal and professional lives of the people in blue uniform (when wearing a uniform) are dangerously and sometimes fatally broken. The fact that the police hero is a woman and the murderer a man reverses the balance of power and paves the way for the feminist themes of many of Kathryn Bigelow‘s upcoming films. Megan Turner is an interesting character in a violent, male-dominated world. Her bosses and fellow police officers interfere in her private life and force her to play the role of bait for the murderer, but limit her actions and force her to act alone at key moments. Jamie Lee Curtis fills in this role excellently, managing to be much more than a sexy appearance in a police uniform. The film would have been much more convincing if it had continued more consistently on the line of psychological thriller, but somewhere, after half, the writers seem to have run out of ideas and then resorted to bloody scenes and standard situations as in action movies of the kind that are made about a hundred a year. Ron Silver doesn’t manage to be a convincing murderer either, and some of his exaggerated grimaces seem a bit ridiculous today. Kathryn Bigelow already proves, many years before the films that will bring her glory and awards, that she knows how to film and make the landscape that surrounds the heroes much more than a background. Some scenes that would be absolutely banal turn into memorable ones because of the cinematic aesthetics and we can feel the fact that the director is also a graphical artist. ‘Blue Steel‘ would have been just another B-movie without Curtis’ acting and Bigelow‘s film directing. Their work gives the movie its quality and compensates for many other shortcomings, bringing in evidence the signs of the talent of a filmmaker whose fame was patiently awaiting for her on the other side of the millennia.