Mulholland Falls

Mulholland Falls is a 1996 American neo-noir crime thriller film directed by Lee Tamahori, written by Pete Dexter, and starring an ensemble cast featuring Nick Nolte, Jennifer Connelly, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Melanie Griffith, Andrew McCarthy, Treat Williams, and John Malkovich. Nolte plays the head of an elite group of four Los Angeles Police Department detectives (based on the real life "Hat Squad") who are known for stopping at nothing, including outright murder, to maintain control of their jurisdiction, with the tacit approval of the police chief (Bruce Dern). A similar theme is the basis of a 2012 film, Gangster Squad (in which Nolte and Chris's brother Sean Penn also appeared), as well as the television miniseries, Mob City. Plot In the early 1950s, a four-man squad of LAPD detectives, frustrated with the rules and weaknesses of the legal system stopping them from more aggressively battling crime, commit an extrajudicial execution when they toss Jack Flynn, a powerful gangster from Chicago, off a cliff on Mulholland Drive, nicknamed "Mulholland Falls" for all the criminals they have thrown to their deaths. The squad leader, Lieutenant Maxwell Hoover, and his partners Ellery Coolidge, Eddie Hall, and Arthur Relyea are brought in to investigate the suspicious death of a young woman whose body was found at a construction site. An examination reveals that every bone in her body is broken and the coroner comments that she looks as though she "jumped off a cliff" even though there are no cliffs nearby. The woman turns out to be someone Hoover knew very well: a prostitute named Allison Pond. The detectives receive a film of Allison having sex in a motel room, taken by a camera hidden behind a two-way mirror. Allison's friend, Jimmy Fields, admits that he and Allison made numerous such films, including one with Hoover in it. Fields is subsequently murdered while being guarded by Hall and Relyea.