Mark Hellinger - Later Career

Later Career

By 1937, Hellinger was a syndicated columnist featured in 174 newspapers. That same year he was hired as a writer/producer by Jack Warner. He provided the story for the 1939 Jimmy Cagney/Raoul Walsh gangster film The Roaring Twenties, basing it on his own experiences during that decade. In his onscreen foreword to the film, he wrote, "It may come to pass that, at some distant date, we will be confronted with another period similar to the one depicted in this photoplay. If that happens, I pray that the events, as dramatized here, will be remembered. In this film, the characters are composites of people I knew, and the situations are those that actually occurred. Bitter or sweet, most memories become precious as the years move on. This film is a memory - and I am grateful for it."

Due to a congenital heart condition, Hellinger repeatedly was rejected for active service during World War II. Instead, he briefly worked as a war correspondent, writing human interest stories about the troops.

Other Hollywood producer credits included They Drive by Night, High Sierra, Thank Your Lucky Stars, The Horn Blows at Midnight, Brute Force, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, and The Naked City, which he also narrated. The film was released several weeks after Hellinger's death, and in his review for the New York Times, Bosley Crowther called it "a virtual Hellinger column on film" and "his appropriate valedictory" and observed, "The late Mark Hellinger's personal romance with the City of New York was one of the most ecstatic love affairs of the modern day — at least, to his host of friends and readers who are skeptics regarding l'amour. Before he became a film producer and was still just a newspaper scribe, Mr. Hellinger went for Manhattan in a blissfully uninhibited way — for its sights and sounds and restless movements, its bizarre people and its equally bizarre smells. And he made quite a local reputation framing his fancies in flowery billets doux which stirred the hearts and the humors of readers of the tabloid press."

Hellinger won the 1947 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture for The Killers.