What you saw was an unlikely bit of resume-building by an already-famous director.

The problem for Nicolas Winding Refn was that, in 2007 when he directed "Miss Marple: Nemesis" for PBS and Britain's ITV, he was still only really famous in his native Denmark. His debut film, 1996's gritty drug-crime thriller "Pusher," had already produced two sequels, while his only English-language attempt, 2003's "Fear X," was a flop.

His next attempt at an English-language production was a very different sort of crime story than he was used to.

He went from gritty to cozy (the popular mystery-genre term for Agatha Christie's type of crime tale) in directing the 2007 film featuring Christie's famous, elderly sleuth.

It was, by all accounts, a journeyman's job -- it was one of four Marple films produced that year by ITV and PBS, and it featured none of the grimy style that has come to be Refn's hallmark, thanks to subsequent hits such as 2008's "Bronson" and his landmark film, the 2011 Ryan Gosling-starring "Drive."

He admitted to England's "Guardian" newspaper in 2011 that, stylistic questions aside, he also did the Marple film simply because he needed the money.

That's not to say "Miss Marple: Nemesis" wasn't stylish or dark, at least for an Agatha Christie story. The usual murder and intrigue are there, this time centered around a long-missing woman and a wartime romance gone wrong, with the climactic revelation of the murderer happening in the dimly lit basement of an old Catholic church.

It just wasn't Refn's kind of dark. However, it seems to have provided him the inroad he needed -- he hasn't produced a Danish film since, and his subsequent films have for the most part been increasingly successful, and all have served to build his brand: violent, sad and stylish.

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