The years between 1950 and 1960 were difficult for the great Hollywood film industry. A sentence of the Supreme Court of the United States decreed the end of the studios' productive and distributive oligopoly and, at the same time, TV began to become very popular.

The significant drop in films produced created problems for the programming of many movie theaters, which had also been seeing the number of spectators go down. The cinema crisis touched all genres, including western that, for decades, had represented the most popular soul of the offers on large screens. But the story had not come to terms with a director destined to enter the celluloid world as a protagonist: Sergio Leone.