And yet A Clockwork Orange remains in some ways misunderstood, and some of its innovations still haven't been given enough due: its strength as a genre-less film, its insurgent marketing plan, its stylized violence, and its unprecedented use of music, all of which shaped both film and pop culture as well as influenced society at-large for decades to come.

We can get a glimpse of the film's prismatic legacy in the rankings from American Film Institute, which, while not to be taken too seriously, speak to a broader misrepresentation of the film over time. For example: despite sharing very few traits with many of the action flicks or tense, slow-simmered classics that gum up the AFI Top 100 Thrills list, the film is ranked No. 21 on the list. And despite not being (by any acclamation) a science-fiction film, A Clockwork Orange is ranked No. 4 on the AFI Best Sci-Fi List.

Mike Kaplan, who was Kubrick's aide-de-camp and the film's promotional master—"before 'marketing' had entered the industry vernacular" he explains—takes umbrage at the designation of the film in any category.

"He [Kubrick] was incapable of making a pure genre movie—too smart—though many were mistakenly promoted that way," Kaplan says. " Clockwork doesn't fit into the traditional 'science fiction' or 'violent' category, which was attempted to expand the audience after its successful initial campaign. Everyone wanted to fit Stanley and the film in a pigeonhole."

Well, almost everyone. At the time of its release, critic Pauline Kael scathingly dubbed the film "a porno-violent sci-fi comedy." She was criticizing the movie, but she was right to recognize it belonged to no single genre. Its varying themes and social satire, its portrayal of government, politicians of both the left and right, church, family, friendship, and many other instruments of society as broken or impotent, went beyond the normal bounds of most films of its era. The use of Nadsat, the slang Burgess invented for the novel and Kubrick later adapted, kept the film from being moored to the time period of its release (although many other stylistic cracks allow some light through). The film's violence garnered it an X-rating and, following a surge of protests and copycat crimes, Kubrick withdrew the film in the United Kingdom, a ban that lasted just beyond until his death in 1999, lending it its cultish aura.

When A Clockwork Orange was released, it reached audiences in a way that no film had ever before. Eschewing the standard practice of having a studio sales executive select cinemas for the film's release, Kubrick—whose meticulous nature was legend—worked assiduously with Kaplan to hand-pick the best venues for the film's rollout. In order to do so, they needed to find out how comparable films from other studios grossed in certain cinemas, information that was closely guarded at the time.