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 to maintain control of their jurisdiction. Their work has the tacit approval of L.A.'s police chief (Bruce Dern). A similar theme is the basis of a 2013 film, "Gangster Squad", which Nolte also appeared in, and a 2013 television miniseries, "Mob City". In the early 1950s, a four-man squad of unorthodox Los Angeles Police Department detectives begins throwing its weight around by tossing Jack Flynn, an organized crime figure from Chicago, off a cliff on Mulholland Drive, nicknamed "Mulholland Falls" for all the men they have thrown off it. Detective Lieutenant Maxwell Hoover and his partners Coolidge, Hall, and Relyea are called to investigate a suspicious death of a young woman found at a construction site. 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 woman turns out to be someone Hoover knew very well, Allison Pond. The detectives receive a film of Allison having sex in a motel room, taken by a secretly hidden camera behind a two-way mirror. Allison's friend Jimmy Fields admits to making this film and more, including one with Hoover in it. Fields is murdered while being guarded by Hall and Relyea. Radioactive glass is found in Allison's foot, which leads the detectives to the Nevada Test Site, where they illegally break in and investigate. Colonel Fitzgerald threatens to lock up the police officers, warning them that they have no authority here. 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, who admits the affair to Hoover but has an alibi for the day of her death. Max's marriage to wife Kate is jeopardized by someone desperate to retrieve the film. An FBI agent fails to persuade the LAPD's Chief to drop the case, so Lt. Hoover's house is ransacked by FBI men with a search warrant, but no film is found.