10 Incredible Movie Parodies Nobody Noticed

Though anyone can see that the Coen brothers' The Big Lebowski is an extremely funny film, to more casual audiences it surely wasn't clear that the Coens were actually taking affectionate aim at a classic movie genre: film noir.

Joel Coen has admitted that the film is inspired by the works of noir author Raymond Chandler, especially his novel The Big Sleep, which was of course adapted into a classic 1946 Humphrey Bogart-starring movie.

The Coens styled The Big Lebowski as a parody of The Big Sleep and noirs like it: deeply mysterious thrillers in which a hard-boiled detective protagonist ends up ensnared in a wildly convoluted crime plot that's almost impossible to completely follow. In Joel Coen's own words:

"We wanted to do a Chandler kind of story – how it moves episodically, and deals with the characters trying to unravel a mystery, as well as having a hopelessly complex plot that's ultimately unimportant."

By making their protagonist the furthest thing possible from a Bogart-type - Jeff Bridges' lackadaisical slacker The Dude - the Coens got to have a tremendous amount of fun tinkering around with the predominant noir formula.

And yet, to less cinema-literate audiences who perhaps haven't seen a single film noir from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the parodical aspect doesn't announce itself whatsoever.