Mulholland Falls (1996)

Mulholland Falls is a 1996 American neo-noir crime film directed by Lee Tamahori. The drama features Nick Nolte, Jennifer Connelly, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen, Chris Penn, Melanie Griffith, 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 to maintain control of their jurisdiction. Their work has the tacit approval of the LAPD Chief (Bruce Dern).

In the early 1950s, a four-man squad of unorthodox LAPD detectives begins throwing its weight around by throwing Jack Flynn, a suspected organized crime figure, off a cliff on Mulholland Drive, nicknamed "Mulholland Falls" for all the men they have tossed off it. Detective Maxwell Hoover and his partners Coolidge, Hall and Relyea are called to investigate a suspicious death of a young lady found at a construction site. It turns out the victim is the beautiful Allison Pond, a once aspiring actress with whom Max had a six-month affair. The evidence shows that every bone in her body is broken. A coroner deduces that she looks like she "jumped off a cliff," although there are no cliffs nearby. The detectives receive a film of Allison having sex in a motel room, taken by a secretly hidden camera behind a one-way mirror. Allison's gay friend Jimmy Fields admits to making this film and more, but he is murdered before he can testify. Radioactive glass is found in Allison's foot, which leads the detectives to the Nevada Atomic Testing Site, where they illegally break in and investigate. Colonel Fitzgerald threatens to lock up the police officers, warning them that they have no authority there. The man in the film with Allison proves to be the civilian commander of the secret base, retired General Thomas Timms, now head of the Atomic Energy Commission. Max's marriage to Kate is jeopardized by someone desperate to retrieve the film, a blackmailer who sends Kate a copy of a film showing her husband and Allison having sex in the same motel room. Despite the FBI's attempt to persuade the LAPD's Chief and his squad to drop the case, further investigation leads the detectives to the "atomic soldiers" used as guinea pigs for A-Bomb tests, now dying en masse in a secret military hospital. Images of them also were captured on a film made by Jimmy Fields. As Max and his partner Ellery Coolidge get close to the truth, they nearly end up just like Allison, thrown out of a C-47 cargo plane. In a vicious struggle, the detectives fight for their lives during a shoot-out on the plane. Colonel Fitzgerald is thrown off by Max, falling to his death. The pilot is fatally shot but manages to crash land. Coolidge dies of a bullet wound after surviving the crash. Max cannot reconcile with his wife at the funeral because she feels betrayed and heartbroken. At the cemetery, where he explains that his unit has been disbanded, she walks out on Max for good.