In a review published shortly after the release of Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), Harvey R. Greenberg offers the following summary:

It is clear that Greenberg considers Unforgiven as a highly conscious response to both the formal structures of the so-called classical Western and the genre's celebration of its most famous heroes: be they mythologised historical figures such as Wyatt Earp, fictitious national allegories like Shane, or that most curious and uneasy synthesis of the two – John Wayne. Critical responses to Unforgiven have tended to fall into one of two broad categories. On the one hand, there are those who, like Greenberg, evidently see in David Webb Peoples’ gloomy script an apocalyptic repudiation of the classical Western's ‘bellicose’ glorification of violence.