Greetings and welcome Django. Certainly a very classic user name and fitting avatar but was surprised to see you only placed Django as number 18 on your top 20 then 
Thanks for the welcome!
Well, I think there are better movies than āDjangoā, but I really love that character played by Franco Nero. Thatās why I chose this user name. 
Thanks Sebastian. This is only my second visit to the new forum, but already I am getting better at navigating it.
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Hi All,
Happy to be hereā¦
Cheers,
LR
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Welcome, Lone Rider! Weāre happy to have you here amigo!
The hapiness is all ours the honor at least
Enjoy Lone Rider ! 
Hola amigos. New guy. I like movies - especially spaghetti westerns. Not usually as big on their American counterparts, but oh well.
I sometimes make short films too, but Iām not here to shamelessly self promote.
Yo.
Well met DeadChannel. Iām no big fan of American westerns either so you are definitely not alone
Welcome DeadChannel. Cool name!
I like American westerns from roughly the late sixties/early seventies onwards, when the Italian westerns had imo largely run out of juice and taken themselves down the āparodyā route. But Iāve definitely struggled to truly fall in love with the more āGolden Ageā Hollywood westerns of the 30ās-50ās. It always seems as though no bugger can go fifteen minutes without breaking into song in those movies! Or maybe Iām just scared that thatās whatās about to happen. 
Donāt get me wrong, I make exceptions. Peckinpaw, Tarantino, some Clint Eastwood stuff. I just really donāt get off on the super idealized happy-clappy good-guys-win-and-are-perfect-in-every-way raw-raw John Wayne stuff.
And well met, the both of you. This seems like a pretty cool place.
So cool youāll need mittens in the winter
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Actually most US westerns I have seen donāt fall in that category. Even not really the Wayne ones, at least not the ones which are important.
Actually most SWs have also a pretty simple good/bad constellation, and there is mostly not the slightest doubt that the hero wins at the end.
Simple for me. There are crap westerns regardless of where they are made.
Really? Thatās never really been my experience with the genre. Films like The Great Silence (my favourite western) and Cut Throats Nine, for instance, stand out as films that end in ways that would not have been attempted in (that period of) America cinema. And when Italian westerns do end well, it tends to be more bittersweet because there is less of a gap between the protagonist and antagonist. Lots of films even subtextually reference this aspect of the genre (for instance, in TGS, both Loco and Silence charge the same amount of money to kill, highlighting the fact that, at some fundamental level, they are no different). In addition, while lots of spaghettis deal with the traditional good vs evil paradigm, they tend to do it in a less black and white way. Usually, characters are some shade of grey in the Italian western, which (appears to me to be) is less common in their American counterparts. In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, for instance, even though Blondie is clearly the āprotagonistā, we percieve the conflict as a rivalry between the characters who are on similar moral ground rather than a clash between good and evil. This is the case even despite the fact that good and evil are in the very title of the film(āThe Good, The Badā¦ā).
This is something of an interesting topic for me, and I donāt want to derail the intro thread, so perhaps a new topix should be started if one doesnāt already exist?
At first, if you want to compare US Ws and SWs, it is completely wrong to compare 50s US Ws with late 60s SWs. In the 60s the film language developed more quickly than in the 60 years before. And censorship obstructions, which had before changed constant but slowly over the past 30 years, were pulverized within a few years.
If you want to compare US Ws and SWs you should only compare films of the same time. And you find rarely US Ws in the 60 which have this kind of whitewashed hero you describe. In the 60s the US western became more and more paranoid and pessimistic, without any SW influence, and there are not more any certainties in them.
Peckinpahās twilight westerns did renew the US W, but they were also part of a constantly changing western landscape, they are like every western built on that what was before.
Also the violence was increasing in US Ws of the 60s parallel to the different SWs violence.
I doubt that there was any US W in the 60s with such noble heroes as in the German Karl May westerns
And actually, there are also already enough 50s US Ws with ambiguous heroes, there are enough 50s westerns with a lot of dirt in them, with unusual stories, with interesting variations of the established patterns.
Still the US W of the 60s and 70s is mostly very different from the SW, but in an other way than many SW friends think.
Alright, you make some good points. Could you throw me some recs from that period of U.S. westerns to get me started making up my own mind?
Now weāre getting a bit off topic
Right, sure. Stanton, do you mind throwing me a pm? This forum has that, right?