It was 45 years ago that Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange premiered in Britain. Fuelled by a rare combination of critical acclaim and ballooning controversy, it had a phenomenal run at the box office for two straight years, before Kubrick himself pulled the film from UK circulation, alarmed and finally defeated by accusations of "copycat" rapes and killings, and no longer able to stomach the thought that his film had become a tool for evil – a template.

Intellectually, the film's moral argument had been grasped and turned over obsessively. The tale of Alex, a sadistic delinquent and leader of a gang of "droogs", whose nightly rampages of "ultraviolence" are curbed by his arrest, then programmed out of him by a radical new form of aversion therapy, resounded as a heavily ironic cautionary fable about free will.

It was the film's aesthetic – a giddily sophisticated blending of pop iconography with high art, fast and slow motion, zoom lenses and wide angles, all to bursts of synthesized Beethoven, Purcell and Rossini – that guaranteed it a more seductive, and sometimes troublesome, hold on the imagination of youth culture.

Droogs: Warren Clarke, James Marcus and Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange Credit: Everett Collection/Rex Features

That has persisted ever since, with David Bowie, Madonna, Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga just a few of the performers who donned white jumpsuits, black bowlers and false eyelashes, around just the one eye.

The book's author, Anthony Burgess, was not the only person with mixed feelings about Kubrick's vision. Dr Strangelove's screenwriter, Terry Southern, first pressed the novel on Kubrick, and it became his chosen project after 2001: A Space Odyssey, when a planned epic about Napoleon failed to get off the ground. On the page, Burgess's dystopian satire didn't underplay the vicious glee that makes Alex Public Enemy No 1, but his use of first-person narration and "Nadsat" – the Russian-inflected argot adopted by the droogs – meant the whole text was their stylised playground.

Kubrick was less interested in the language than the look. Despite fragments of voiceover from Malcolm McDowell, and the startling introduction of the character, in tight, smirking close-up at the Korova Milk Bar, his film isn't committed to Alex's psychopathic point of view. There are God's-eye overhead shots of prisons; the balletic choreography of gang assaults; and wide frames in the classic Kubrickian key of institutional dehumanisation.

Because of Kubrick's longstanding reticence and suspicion of the mainstream media, Burgess found himself – resentfully – in the position of having to defend a work that wasn't fully consistent with his original intentions. They differed philosophically on what the violence of the droogs quite means.

For Burgess, and the character of the prison chaplain, it's a matter of liberty to choose between good and evil, wherever it takes us: the author claims to have sickened himself by having to depict such garish atrocities to forge his argument. Kubrick talked instead about how Alex "represents the id, the savage repressed side of our nature which guiltlessly enjoys the pleasures of rape", a reading for which the director had to find rampant and joyful stylistic expression. This emphasis leaves the film open to attack on, above all, feminist grounds: it revels in what are ecstatic fantasies of the released id for men only, with women as titillating props.

The casting of McDowell, already noted for his turn as a charismatic teenage rebel in Lindsay Anderson's If ... (1968), was Kubrick's masterstroke. His insolent charm seduces you into Alex's world of looped Ludwig Van and loopy self-gratification. For all the shocking crimes he perpetrates, it's extraordinary how much sympathy Alex still manages to elicit in the film's later stages. Kubrick drew a comparison with Richard III, though the critic Pauline Kael pointed out that Alex's running over of small animals and raping of underage girls were penchants slyly eliminated in Kubrick's adaptation to make him more palatable.

The id unleashed: Malcolm McDowell as Alex Credit: Film Stills/Warner Bros

More systematically, the movie eliminates any chance of our sympathies straying elsewhere, largely through wittily horrible caricature. The youth worker P R Deltoid (Aubrey Morris) is a slimy pederast, Michael Bates's chief prison guard a barking martinet. Alex's parents (Philip Stone and Sheila Raynor) are vacillating nobodies. Meanwhile, the leftist writer Mr Alexander, beaten to the floor and forced to watch as Alex rapes his wife, becomes a mad widower in a wheelchair, played with outrageously splenetic fervour by Patrick Magee.

The only subsidiary characters presented with any compassion, strangely, are the chaplain and the Minister of the Interior, who take opposite views on the choice-eradicating Ludovico treatment: for a brief moment they each have a hand on one of Alex's shoulders, inviting us to weigh the film's sociological debate from both sides.

When the film opened, it was right in the thick of the censorship controversies around sexual violence in Ken Russell's The Devils and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, both of which were rigidly vetted for cuts.

Kubrick protested against the X rating it received in the States, and resubmitted it with 30 seconds trimmed out to achieve an R, permitting a wider release. Still, even the uncut version got four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Director.

It was in all ways the film of its moment, and certainly the most divisive one, with critics, politicians and the papers all staking out their positions for or against.

The copycat furore grew to a point where the title alone is still enough to inspire reflexive shudders in a large constituency of people who've never seen it. Since being reissued on DVD in 2000, its reputation has settled somewhat: though it's frequently called Kubrick's most dated movie, the retro-kitsch production design has an enduring appeal.

It's something you can watch again, only to find yourself ferociously disagreeing with whatever you last thought of it. The film's thesis on an individual's moral choice may remain fixed in itself, but its implications shift as we do.