CITY OF FALLEN ANGELS : MOODY `MULHOLLAND FALLS' PROBES THIS SUN-DRENCHED CITY'S DARK SECRETS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Writer

There's something about the setting: Los Angeles, midcentury, sun-blasted by day, soul-dark by night. Moviemakers can't get enough of it, but getting it right has proved elusive, like a desert mirage or the license and power that Hollywood promises.

The latest guy to try to capture this sensuously rotting vision on screen is Lee Tamahori, the New Zealand director whose withering study of a disintegrating Maori family, ``Once Were Warriors,'' was one of last year's most acclaimed films. Tamahori's second movie, ``Mulholland Falls,'' is immersed in the high style, dirty secrets and sudden violence of '50s L.A.

It's a lovingly re-created murder mystery starring Nick Nolte, Chazz Palminteri, Michael Madsen and Chris Penn as fictionalized members of the Hat Squad, a legendary, elite LAPD detective unit. Jennifer Connelly and Melanie Griffith are the two very different women in the life of Nolte's Max Hoover, while John Malkovich and Treat Williams play two very different - but equally threatening - military officers involved in secretive nuclear tests.

It's all a long way from contemporary New Zealand, but as Tamahori makes clear, this quintessentially American kind of intrigue has captured imaginations throughout the world.

``America is not my culture, but I'm very mindful of the fact that a lot of people from all over the world come here and make movies,'' said Tamahori, a rail-thin, white-haired 45-year-old of mixed Maori and European heritage. ``Without understanding the culture, you can go into these genres, which are very established cinematically. You kind of almost know the landscape.

``I'm fascinated with stories about power and corruption,'' added Tamahori, who listed hard-boiled L.A. crime writers Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald among his favorite authors. ``And this story focuses very intensely on that.''

The Hats - who tool around town in magnificently tailored suits, a Buick Roadmaster convertible and felt fedoras that, miraculously, never fall off - have carte blanche from Police Chief William Parker (Bruce Dern) to do whatever they wish to keep organized crime out of Los Angeles. Rather than some water feature, the film's title describes the falls mobsters take down the Hollywood Hills if the Hats get their hands on them.

But when these rights-ignoring public guardians investigate a murder that strikes much too close to Hoover's home, they begin to uncover a conspiracy of powers well beyond their blackjack-wielding comprehension.

``It fascinates me to explore this '50s mentality of power,'' said Nolte, who is developing another L.A. crime-and-conspiracy picture from the period based on James Ellroy's novel ``White Jazz.'' ``It's ultimate power, and it ultimately corrupts.''

Personal and social corruption rests at the heart of ``Mulholland Falls,'' as it does any good film, from Billy Wilder's 1944 ``Double Indemnity'' to Roman Polanski's 1974 ``Chinatown,'' with a similar setting and themes. The trick to making these things work - and when they don't, as in ``True Confessions'' (1981) and the ``Chinatown'' sequel ``The Two Jakes'' (1990), the results are pretty ponderous - seems to be generating audience empathy with far-from-sympathetic protagonists.

``The Hat Squad; they're not good or bad,'' observed Chris Penn, who has played ethical gangsters (``Reservoir Dogs'') and questionable cops (``True Romance'') in the recent past. ``They're trying to solve a murder - that's good, so we put one in that column. They go about it by beating people ruthlessly - that's bad. They find the guys - that's good!

``They are what they are, you know what I mean? And they are the way police were back then ... and, to a large degree, still are, only it's kept quieter now unless somebody has a video camera.''

Tamahori was well aware that sharp clothes would not be enough to get audiences on the side of the Hat Squad.

``I knew going into this that, if you're going to deal with a bunch of cops that beat the crap out of people, violate their civil rights at every turn and, yet, are seemingly still on our side, you're going to have to follow a very strong moral line with them,'' the director said. ``Even though it's not spelled out, you get the feeling that these guys are really only cleaning up the kind of people that Dirty Harry cleaned up.

``But this is pre-Miranda decision, pre-civil rights,'' Tamahori explained. ``In some ways, I know that some people out there long for these guys to come back. But we know they can't because they're loose cannons, and they'll cross over to a point where they can't be controlled. But if these guys did not have that moral center, it would just be too hard to get a lock on them as characters. I think you get the sense that, when they come upon this horrid discovery, it's as reprehensible to them as it would be to anyone.''

While ``Mulholland Falls' '' distancing time period may cut it a little slack on the police brutality front, it's also bound to generate touchy comparisons to the movie many consider one of the greatest of all time. When it comes to hidden depravity, murky motives and top-level conspiracies that blindside the wisest guys, ``Chinatown'' is the L.A. standard by which all others are measured.

``A lot of people will probably come after me for that, there's almost no doubt,'' Tamahori acknowledged. ``It's impossible now to make a movie like this, in that period, without being compared to `Chinatown' - I noticed Carl Franklin got the same thing last year when he made `Devil in a Blue Dress.'

``We never wanted to do anything like that. However, I'm a great lover of that movie, and there's no doubt that it's had an impact. But look at `Chinatown'; it's a true original, but it still owes a lot to (Orson Welles') `Touch of Evil' and a lot of other, earlier films. The thing I love about making a film like this is looking back at the works of people who did it well before you.''

And a lot of those people, like ``Chinatown's'' Polanski and Wilder and Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, were immigrants who came to Los Angeles with eyes that were peculiarly good at peering into the shadows that lurk under the warm California sun.

``They can sometimes see things clearer than if they were an American,'' Nolte said of foreign directors. ``As for Lee, he's been looking at American films in New Zealand for years. I think he has just as much right to interpret it as anybody on the inside. Sometimes, Americans can be too close to it to tell that story right. In this case, I think it works well for the film.''

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3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) From left: Christopher Penn, Mi chael Madsen, Chazz Palminteri and Nick Nolte in ``Mulholland Falls.''

(2) ``It fascinates me to explore this '50s mentality of power,'' says Nick Nolte, second from left, of portraying a member of a ruthless team of LAPD detectives - along with Christopher Penn, left, Michael Madsen and Chazz Palminteri - in ``Mulholland Falls.''

(3) Of telling a quintessentially American story, New Zealand director Lee Tamahori, left, with star Nolte, says, ``Sometimes, Americans can be too close to it to tell that story right.''