When Quentin Tarantino released Inglourious Basterds in 2009, audiences didn’t just meet a colorful World War II character—they met a myth. Lt. Aldo “the Apache” Raine, played with relish by Brad Pitt, is a hillbilly from Tennessee who leads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting rampage across Nazi-occupied France. With his drawl, his scar, and his refusal to bow to authority, Aldo feels less like a conventional soldier and more like a figure ripped from 19th-century American folklore….

There’s a reason Rick Blaine has become one of cinema’s most enduring characters. On the surface, he’s just Humphrey Bogart in a tuxedo, running a nightclub in wartime Casablanca, tossing off wisecracks and pouring bourbon. But scratch the surface and you find a character stitched together from the cultural DNA of the early 20^th century: the Lost Generation of Hemingway’s novels, the hard-boiled detectives of Hammett and Chandler, and an undercurrent of philosophical Stoicism that gives his story its moral heft. In other words, Rick is not just a character in Casablanca—he’s the culmination of two decades of literary and cultural archetypes…..