The Japanese film-maker Seijun Suzuki, who has died aged 93, was best known in the west for his deliriously entertaining and inventively realised crime and gangster B-movies, and turned out at a conveyor-belt rate by Nikkatsu studios in the 1960s.

Among such colourful titles as Detective Bureau 23: Go to Hell, Bastards! (1963) and Tattooed Life (1965), for many the masterpiece of this period is Branded to Kill (1967), a dream-logic portrait of a hitman embroiled in a battle for top-dog position in the underworld ranking of contract killers. However, few cared much for it at the time, least of all the studio president, Kyusaku Hori, who fired the director, claiming his films didn’t make sense and didn’t make money. Suzuki sued for unfair dismissal, an act that saw him blacklisted by the industry and relegated to directing commercials and one-off dramas for television over the next 10 years.

In his homeland, Suzuki is best remembered for his dramatic return to film-making with the independently produced Zigeunerweisen (1980). This hauntingly stylised and elliptical chamber piece, based on the novel Disk of Sarasate by Hyakken Uchida, was ranked by critics of the prestigious Kinema Junpo magazine as the best film of the year. In it, when former colleagues are reunited by chance and their lives become intertwined, they share a recording of Sarasate’s Gypsy Airs and a fixation with a mysterious geisha. The film was the beginning of Suzuki’s Taisho trilogy, marked by a more art house sensibility; it continued with Heat-Haze Theatre (1981) and Yumeji (1991), and was so called because all three were set during the Taisho era (1912-26) of liberal enlightenment and new exposure to western technology and culture.

It was during this period that Seitaro Suzuki (his professional name Seijun was to appear first on his 1958 noir thriller Underworld Beauty) was born to a family in the textile business in Tokyo’s Nihonbashi district, three months before the city was flattened by the Great Kantō earthquake of 1923 that killed more than 100,000 people.

His war years were similarly turbulent: twice he went down on ships sunk by the US. After Japan’s surrender, having failed the entrance exam to the University of Tokyo, he enrolled in the film department of Kamakura Academy in 1946, subsequently entering the studios of the leading production company Shochiku and being lured in 1954 by the prospect of better pay to the rival studio Nikkatsu. It was there that he made his debut in 1956 with Harbor Toast: Victory Is in Our Grasp, in which a sailor rescues his brother from a vengeful yakusa.

Much of Suzuki’s subsequent output, averaging three or four films a year, involved working within Nikkatsu’s popular “borderless action” brand, colourful hybrids of musicals, youth and crime movies that looked to western sources for their cues to create gaudy cinematic worlds that bore little resemblance to contemporary Japanese reality.

Tokyo Drifter, 1966, directed by Seijun Suzuki, had similarities with minor Hollywood westerns. Suzuki said: ‘In my films, time and place are nonsense.’ Photograph: Nikkatsu/Rex/Shutterstock

Suzuki brought an almost kabuki-esque theatricality to the pulp fodder he was assigned, through an expressive use of colour, baroque set designs, off-kilter compositions and jarring edits. His style became increasingly extravagant with the gangster movie Youth of the Beast (1963), which features a scene shot from beneath a glass floor, an exploding car enveloped in gaudy pink fog, and a sandstorm raging incongruously outside the window of a drug-addicted prostitute as she is punished by her pimp. By contrast, the outlaw protagonist of Tokyo Drifter (1966) routinely bursts into impromptu musical numbers and at one point is caught in the middle of a bar-room brawl straight out of a B-movie Hollywood western. As the director himself explained, “In my films, time and place are nonsense.”

There were less frivolous works from this period. Story of a Prostitute (1965) portrayed the horrors of the 1938 Sino-Japanese war through the eyes of a prostitute serving alongside the troops of a remote military outpost in Manchuria, while Fighting Elegy (1966) presented an allegory for the rise of militarism in the 1930s through the playground scuffles of its rowdy high-school protagonists.

His increasingly distinctive brand of flamboyance and playful irreverence ultimately earned Suzuki a cult following worldwide, but little of his work was seen outside Japan until his first retrospective in 1984 at the Pesaro film festival in Italy led to a reappraisal by international critics. Ten years later, British audiences first encountered his films in a season at the ICA. He appeared there in person in 2005 for a second retrospective accompanying the release of his final work, Princess Raccoon (2005), an exuberant period musical starring Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Zhang Ziyi.

Suzuki is survived by his second wife, Takako, whom he married in 2004, and his younger brother, Kenji.

• Seijun Suzuki, film director, born 24 May 1923; died 13 February 2017