Gee, is this the footprint of Godzilla? How about, ah, that one with three heads? No?
The hard, dirty cops in the noir thriller Mulholland Falls (1996) are, sadly, not hard enough for me to believe them, at least not in the TV-cut version which we saw. These cops, a unit formed to oust organized crime from Los Angeles, CA, start the movie off one evening in the early 1950s by tossing a would-be mob boss off of the cliff where Mulholland Drive has a lovely view of Los Angeles.
The next morning, though, the pulverized body of a woman is brought to the attention of the squad’s boss, Captain Hoover. She is swiftly identified as the beautiful Alison Pond. The trail to her killers leads to a confederate who took films of her with her lovers, through Captain Hoover’s hotel bedroom, and onwards to a military base where a leader of the atomic bomb effort, General Timms, is mortally ill and babbles at length concerning how sometimes the one hundred must be sacrificed for the one thousand. As it happens, there’s a hospital ward of dying servicemen on the base, all ill from radiation poisoning.
But when Hoover accuses Timms of killing Pond, of making her a member of Timm’s one hundred, it’s a look of innocence and dismissal. On the ride home in the base’s DC-3[1], Hoover and his partner realize they have been setup for an identical fate as that suffered by Pond, but overpower the General’s over-zealous Colonel and his assistant and toss them from the plane, instead. Hoover’s partner also dies in the incident.
In the end, Hoover loses his long-time partner and, possibly, his wife, as well as his former lover, Pond.
As noir goes, Mulholland Falls is definitely mediocre. The problems are principally with the characters. Of the four dirty cops, only Captain Hoover is given much to work with, and the actor, Nick Nolte, doesn’t come through as either brutally stupid or cannily corrupted. He doesn’t achieve the proper look, either, being far too bland to really communicate anything to the audience. This point does bring up the entire question of the importance of appearance in theater. Sometimes it can be used to indicate the moral role of a character, and sometimes it can be used to obscure the moral role. But the look of Captain Hoover said little, being more of a journalistic effort than a dramatic effort.
His partner, Ellery Coolidge, may be a long time partner, or brand new, competent or incompetent. Honestly, none of that comes through. He seems to be just filling that slot marked “Partner, to be ignored when Hoover is in emotional pain.” The other two cops of Hoover’s squad are non-entities, despite their slick suits and very cool convertible.
Even more jarring is General Timms, who comes across more as a dying philosopher or artist, and not a stiff-lipped General, doing his duty. His clothing, his bearing, even his housing did not speak to the constraints of the purported role, but rather someone who probably should never have even been considered military.
Without effective characters in these moral roles of defective, failing people, the plot becomes more artifice than moral lesson. Noir isn’t just about bad endings, it’s about how the selfishly bad decisions of the people inhabiting these scenarios lead to their grim demise. Noir is the flip side of the morality tale wherein doing good leads to good results, even if the self-sacrifice is mortal. Noir is specifically about how following one’s impulses, not socially-approved, leads to an ending other than what one might expect.
And Mulholland Falls never quite gets there.
1 The DC-3 was a sweet workhorse of a plane, as I understand it, with the first rolling off a runway in 1936, and even today some are flying. According to Wikipedia the plane used here is the military version, listed as the C-47.
