Mark Hellinger

Hellinger was a creature of New York nightlife long before Hollywood. One of the first great Broadway columnists, syndicated in scores of papers alongside his friend and rival Walter Winchell, he chronicled Prohibition-era Manhattan — its gangsters, showgirls, and speakeasies — in a punchy, sentimental prose that gave him an ear for the city's underworld rhythms.

He drifted west to write for the movies, and by the 1940s was producing them, mostly at Warner Bros. and Universal. Hellinger found his subject in crime and treated it with a new toughness and realism. The Killers, adapted from a spare Hemingway story, made instant stars of Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner. Brute Force was a brutal, allegorical prison drama directed by Jules Dassin. And The Naked City, shot on the actual streets of New York with a semi-documentary immediacy that broke sharply from studio artifice, closed with the narrator's famous line — "There are eight million stories in the naked city" — which Hellinger himself spoke.

He was building his own independent company, with Humphrey Bogart among the partners, when he died of a heart attack in December 1947, only 44 years old. He never saw The Naked City reach theaters.

Hellinger's run was brief but pointed: he helped drag American crime film toward realism and the real street, and a Broadway theater still bears his name. His pictures pointed the way for the location-shot, socially aware crime dramas that followed.