Of the celebrated British directors indebted to television for their early success, Mike Hodges, who has died aged 90, probably had the most erratic career.

With his feature film debut Get Carter (1971), Hodges made his most acclaimed movie. Although it is now acknowledged as a classic of British cinema, on its release its depiction of gangsterdom and the world of a professional killer was not to every critic’s taste. Pauline Kael described it as “so calculatedly cool and soulless and nastily erotic that it seems to belong to a new genre of virtuoso viciousness”.

Helped by a fine cameraman, Wolfgang Suschitzky, and a brilliant editor, John Trumper, Hodges made use of his television documentary experience and some gritty Newcastle backgrounds to present an unflinching portrait of lowlife Britain – numerous cuts had to be made on its subsequent television outings. In the role of Carter, Michael Caine created a vengeful, icy killer to rank with Lee Marvin’s iconic Walker in John Boorman’s Point Blank.

Get Carter proved a hard act to follow, and distorted the critical and public response to his later works. Hodges later commented ruefully on these “professionally bruising years”, which held “a litany of failure, mostly at the hands of the North Americans”. Certainly, The Terminal Man (1974), Black Rainbow (1989) and Croupier (1998), among others, were movies of individual stature, deserving of a better fate at the hands of distributors and exhibitors than they received.

Hodges was born in Bristol, the son of Norah Cottrell and Graham Hodges, and grew up in what he described as the chocolate-box environment of Salisbury and then Bath, where he was sent to board at Prior Park college. He was persuaded by his parents to take accountancy exams as a route into a “secure profession”, and served his two years of national service as a rating in the Royal Navy on minesweepers. Then he abandoned accountancy and moved to London, taking a modest technical job in the burgeoning world of television.

In his spare time he wrote scripts and worked his way into live TV, on a religious programme, Sunday Break. He got his break with World in Action, which he joined as a producer-director in 1963.

Further experience came with a children’s serial, The Tyrant King (1968) and, significantly, with the sombre Suspect (1969), for the ITV Playhouse series, which he co-produced and directed from his own screenplay. This was followed by Rumour (1970), an urban thriller featuring a harshly drawn journalist – a prototype for later Hodges antiheroes.

Following that feature-length work, it was a logical step for the nearly 40-year-old director to move into feature films on the crest of the realist movement that had dominated British cinema from the late 1950s onwards.

After the success of Get Carter, Caine stayed with Hodges for Pulp (1972), playing a successful writer who accepts an offer to ghost the memoirs of a former Hollywood star (Mickey Rooney) best known for playing gangsters, with calamitous results. It failed commercially, confounding expectations in its blackly comic view of gangsterdom - a far cry from its visceral predecessor.

If Pulp surprised people, The Terminal Man, freely adapted from a Michael Crichton novel, caused consternation with its bleak portrait of a psychopath (George Segal, cast against type) who is experimented on to control his violence. Initially little seen in the US after baffled reviews, it was not released in cinemas in Britain, but surfaced on BBC late-night television.

It was six years before Hodges completed a fourth feature, the high-camp Flash Gordon (1980), based on the comic strip and with a score by Queen, which he took over from Nicolas Roeg. In the interim Hodges had begun directing Damien: Omen II (1978) only to be removed unceremoniously after a month’s filming. Had it not been for the colourful Flash, his career might have stalled. Even so, to keep working he returned to TV, with a thriller, Missing Pieces (1983), and that year supervised the English-language version of Federico Fellini’s lugubrious And the Ship Sailed On.

After Squaring the Circle for television and a segment in Sexy Shorts (both 1984), Hodges returned to the big screen with Morons From Outer Space, a staggeringly banal comedy, starring the comedy duo Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones, that proved a critical, commercial and artistic failure. Once again television helped pay the bills, with an episode in the series The Hitchhiker and Florida Straits (1986), which, like several of his works, was revamped in post-production.

A similar fate awaited the controversial A Prayer for the Dying (1987), with Mickey Rourke as an IRA activist who tries to leave the organisation after a school bus is blown up instead of a British army vehicle. The movie was re-edited and given new music to lessen the violence for American audiences.

Two years later his powerful supernatural thriller, Black Rainbow, with Rosanna Arquette as a medium who discovers that she can predict murder was similarly received. This disturbing and tense work went straight to cable in the US and after lacklustre distribution in Britain found an audience on TV.

In 1994 Hodges directed his first BBC drama, The Healer, but it turned out to be an unhappy union. He subsequently directed a miniseries, Dandelion Dead, and wrote the screenplay for The Lifeforce Experiment before an offer from Channel 4 to direct the noirish Croupier, starring Clive Owen.

Initially Channel 4 considered the completed movie, with its clever screenplay by Paul Mayersberg, too low key for theatrical release. When it received limited distribution in the US the glowing critical response was enough to gain it a wider showing, and offers of cinema screenings in Britain, which reignited interest in his work.

Hodges energetically supported the publicity surrounding its release and the retrospectives of his work that followed in Europe and the US. He subsequently directed his play Shooting Stars and Other Heavenly Pursuits, a wry look at the movie business and its idiocies, in the West End of London in 2001, and in 2003 adapted it for BBC radio, with a cast including Michael Sheen and Michael Gambon, and narrated by Owen. He also directed a documentary about serial killers in film, Murder by Numbers (2001).

Two years later he secured financing for a feature, I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead, again starring Owen. The story of a criminal who comes out of seclusion to investigate the suicide of his younger brother – following his rape by another gangster – had echoes of his admired debut. It was a characteristically bleak work and despite some favourable reviews achieved only modest commercial success, although it, like other earlier films, enjoyed a cult following, and was admired for its ambition and lack of compromise.

In 1964 he married Jean Alexandrov; they divorced in 1982. In 2004 he married Carol Lawes, who survives him, with the two sons, Ben and Jake, from his first marriage.

• Michael Tommy Hodges, screenwriter, film and television director, born 29 July 1932; died 17 December 2022