Kalmouk, before the days of the designer's three day stubble, an unshaved fella in a western was clearly on the wrong side of the law (note that most of the publicity stills of THE SEARCHERS show Ethan unshaved, therefore indicating that this will be a special role).
So the state the italian heros are in, and their shabby clothes (Eastwood even rides a mule into town in his first spaghetti) are another indicator that they turned around the regular hero appearence.
It's good that conversation gets going,
I know there's more stuff we can dig up comparing.
Robbie, you got to look at the big picture when you look at a whole genre.
About the story-element of the drifter in FISTFUL helping the woman eventually:
Leone said the main difference between the spaghetti and the classic US western was this:
In a US-western, a lone rider comes to town. He sees a woman being mistreated. And he reacts accordingly. That was where the US western got "stuck", if you wanna call it that. So Leone in the very first scene of FISTFUL does it completely different: Man with No Name rides into town, witnesses woman and child mistreated - drinks his drink and goes about his business!
When he helps them later on, I won't deny he's doing it because there really IS something good in him. But up to that point, he's only helping the woman away to further hurt his enemy (and in the end, he stays alone, the same drifter he is in the beginning, he doesn't settle down, marry the girl or anything like the regular hero).
The main difference, in my opinion, between the regular hero in the US western and the hero (yes, he's STILL the hero, although of a different breed) is this: the US might be a good guy with a little bit of bad in him. Why? Because when you script a hero, you want him to be interesting. Therefore, let him have a dark history. A mean bone. Just something to make him look REAL. The ITALIAN hero, on the other hand, is a mean man with just a little good in him - for the same reason, to make him more interesting.
Look for instance at that small scene in GOOD, BAD UGLY when The Man with No Name gives a dying boy a smoke. That's the only human thing he's doing for 2 and a half hours. And when the boy's dead - he takes his coat and the cigar from his dead lips! Or Eli Wallach in the same picture: there never was a meaner, dirtier bandit in the West! Yet there's one tiny scene in which he is confronted by his brother, the priest, and he tells him his reasons for becoming a criminal - which makes him human.
A completely good or completely bad person is seldom interesting.
To get back to topic - the question is comparing ITALIAN westerns with JW westerns - I think Ethan is as close as Wayne could come to the Italian Man With No Name. Yet the major difference is of course this:
The regular, pure western hero of the US, even when he is half good/half bad, as Ethan is, or Jimmy Stewart's bounty hunter in The Naked Spur, to name another example, there is always the transition during the film. He might start out as the bad man (like Robert Hightower) but in the end, he will fight for the right cause.
The classic American anti-hero is Bogart, and his trademark sentence is "I stick my head out for nobody" - yet that's exactly what he is going to do in To Have and Have Not and so many others.
It's different with the screen persona of the spaghetti western - and Clint just made three of them, mind you - there was an avalanche of Italian westerns yet only very few made it do the English spoken market. So the Django-films or the numerous westerns with Guiliano Gemma really defined that genre more than the 3 ones with Clint (when Clint brought that persona to the American western with Hang Em High, it was already a fusion between the two: because in the end this man sided with the law). The difference between the Man with No Name and the American western hero (no matter how brutal his methods) is always this:
The spaghetti westerner lives by his own code, makes things happen just for him, not for society. And to win he fights dirty and breaks every code of the west, only to stay alone in the end, take his winnings and take off! (like he does in all the Dollar-westerns) So, essentially, he DOES NOT CHANGE (finally, I come to the point!) during the film as, for instance, Ethan does or the tougher Jimmy-Stewart-characters do, or even the Italianwestern-influenced Dean Martin in Bandolero!, he is the same in the end (The Good, Bad & Ugly even ends with the same situation as they started out).
Those situations worked so well for Leone in Once Upon a Time because those characters didn't need to change - from beginning to end. Bronson doesn't change. Fonda doesn't change. All there is are those huge close-ups of faces without any emotions at all. Morricone once said it was so much fun to do the music because the Leone-characters were like cartoon-characters.
Interesting question.
Leone was certainly interested in some of the same questions as Ford was - of course his answers were quite different! He himself said once: In a Ford-film, when someone opens the window, he is looking at a new future. In my films, he'll get shot.
Of course, then and now it's a strange feeling to see Monument Valley, ultimately "Ford-Country"!, used in Once Upon. The flashback in the final showdown between Bronson and Fonda - the pervert hanging scene - is filmed at the very same spot the town of Tombstone in Fonda's and Ford's "My Darling Clementine" stood. But that and a couple of small other scenes (Claudia Cardinale driving through the valley) were the only shots really done there - the whole rest was filmed in Spain. Leone's was a travesty of the western - the parody of High Noon, the 3 buys waiting for the train, never fails to entertain.
In the spaghetti western, the anti-hero took the place of the regular hero which you'll find in any Wayne-western. This was very much in the zeitgeist of these times, triggered by the war in Vietnam. That anti-hero which became the trademark of Eastwood was ultimately only interested in his own benefit, and back-shooting and using every dirty trick to accomplish that.
The American film was influenced a great deal by that new trend. But I cannot find a lot of that in the later Wayne movies (except for increasing violence). Maybe the only part in these years that comes close to The Man With No Name, as portrayed by Eastwood, is "Lane" from The Train Robbers. It certainly had its share of dirty tricks and soldiers of fortune, which are what the Italian western is all about.
So I think, to answer your question, the Wayne films and the spaghetti westerns had very little in common except for the western setting, they were quite the contrary.
In Europe, Once Upon is handled is one of the best westerns. Personally, I think the last part of Leone's Dollar-trilogy, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, was the better film.
