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Seijun Suzuki's 1966 gangster movie Tokyo Drifter is a classic of Japanese cinema that has influenced the film industry for decades to come. However, despite its now iconic status, Tokyo Drifter was not always an internationally renowned work. After serving in the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, Suzuki became an assistant director at the Shochiku Company's Ofuna Studio. In 1954, Suzuki moved to the Nikkatsu Corporation, where he began as an assistant director before eventually writing screenplays and directing. At Nikkatsu, Suzuki developed a reputation for directing quality B-movies in the yakuza and action genres. Given shoestring budgets and extremely tight schedules, Suzuki found success through films such as Underworld Beauty, Take Aim at the Police Van, and Everything Goes Wrong.

While many of Suzuki's early works achieved moderate commercial success, his artistic breakthrough occurred in 1963 with the release of the yakuza film Youth of the Beast. Starting with Youth of the Beast,...

Japanese film director who gained a worldwide cult following for his flamboyance and irreverence

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...

“I make movies that make no sense,” Seijun Suzuki would often say, and he wasn’t being modest. The prolific director, who died earlier this month at the age of 93, was the Jackson Pollock of Japanese cinema, an irrepressibly creative artist who painted with gobs of color and geysers of fake blood in order to defy the strictures of narrative and remind viewers that movies are more than the stories they tell.

His hyper-stylized gangster sagas, which had a way of turning the most basic B-picture plots into unfettered symphonies for the senses, were born out of a rabid intolerance for boredom; audiences never knew what was going to happen next, and sometimes it’s tempting to suspect that Suzuki didn’t either. Few directors ever did more to fundamentally demolish our understanding of what film could be, and even fewer did so while working under the auspices of a major production studio.