These days, all sorts of novels and plays and movies and music aspire to edginess. That adjective -- "edgy" -- is used a lot and very loosely to describe any art or media that provokes or disturbs, that's even a little off-kilter.

The singer Eminem is called edgy. So are movies like Moulin Rouge. Every series on HBO aims to be edgy. As does the brand new Broadway musical Sweet Smell of Success.

Unfortunately, the musical is not very edgy at all, even though it has edginess deep in its DNA.

CLIP:
("Mac." "Yes." "I don't want this man at my table..." )

It's based on the 1957 film of the same name. The movie starred Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis. It's a portrait of the gamy interconnected businesses of entertainment and journalism and public relations

CLIP:
("Mr. Falco, whom I did not invite to sit at this table tonight, is a hungry press agent and fully up to all the tricks of his very slimey trade...")

That's Lancaster as the terrifying and completely riveting show biz gossip columnist JJ Hunsecker. The man he's disparaging is Sidney Falco, the smarmy, desperate press agent played by Tony Curtis.

I watched the film recently for the first time in years, and it's still wonderful. Disturbing, funny, and amazingly unsentimental for 1957.

CLIP:
("I'll be off and wish you were deaf and wore a hearing aide."
"And with the simple flick of a switch I could shut out the greedy murmur of little men...")

It is an edgy film. And looking back now, it strikes me that Sweet may have been the defining, pioneering artifact of modern edge, 45 years ago.

It's one of the first American movies shot by choice in black-and-white, for aesthetic reasons. Sweet Smell helped invent the idea that in our new Technicolor world black-and-white equals stylish intensity - a major component of edge.

Sweet Smell is a hard-boiled dissection of a seamy world . But it still makes that seamy world glamorous and exciting.

Which is perverse. And perversity is another big part of what we mean today by edge.

The stars of Sweet Smell, Hunsecker and Falco, are sick, conniving creeps -- sick, conniving, and utterly mesmerizing.

CLIP:
("I love this dirty town.")

That's Hunsecker again, watching a drunk get thrown out of a strip club. If that line strikes us as edgy today, imagine how audiences reacted in the 1950s.

But there were two distinct and separate 1950s Americas -- the Eisenhower, Father Knows Best 1950s, all perky and earnest...and the shadowy, glamorous noir 50s.

Now we live in an age that's combined those two 1950s. We live in a time that's both dark and perky. Today we all think we see through the lies and manipulations of the media-entertainment-industrial complex.

With 24/7 coverage of celebrities and show business in every newspaper and magazine and TV channel, everyone is overloaded with the straight scoop, totally clued in.

But with all this gritty knowledge we have now, do we snarl cynically like Hunsecker and Falco?

No way.

We love this dirty culture.

This is Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.