In his obituary, Stephen Prince wrote, "Lou Lombardo's seminal contribution to the history of editing is his work on The Wild Bunch (1969), directed by Sam Peckinpah.
The complex montages of violence that Lombardo created for that film influenced generations of filmmakers and established the modern cinematic textbook for editing violent gun battles.
[9][10][11] Lombardo's career began in Kansas City, where he was Robert Altman's cameraman working on training films and "industrials" for the Calvin Company.
[15] [16] In 1995 Peter Stack wrote, "It's astonishing how harrowing The Wild Bunch is, more than 25 years after it blasted its way onto the big screen to become maybe the best shoot-'em-up ever made, the one that turned meanness into a haunting pictorial poetry and summed up the corruption of guilt, old age and death in the American fantasy of the Old West.
Lombardo described the crucial scene from the television show in a later interview with Vincent LoBrutto, "Joe Don Baker came out and was being shot by all these police.
"[21] Stephen Prince writes, "The editing is audacious and visionary, as the montages bend space and elongate time in a manner whose scope and ferocity was unprecedented in American cinema.
[2] Gabrielle Murray summarized how The Wild Bunch affected filmmaking: "Peckinpah, with the help of the brilliant editor Louis Lombardo and cinematographer Lucien Ballard, developed a stylistic approach that through the use of slow-motion, multi-camera filming and montage editing, seemed to make the violence more intense and visceral.
In terms of the representation of violence, they influenced Arthur Penn and Sam Peckinpah and, from there, Hong Kong director John Woo, as well as virtually everybody since.
Every filmmaker who uses slow motion, montage, and multiple cameras to stylize violence in the ways that Kurosawa had demonstrated in Seven Samurai owes him a great debt.
"[26] Seven Samurai, Bonnie and Clyde, and The Wild Bunch were all in the listing of the best edited films of all time compiled in 2012 by the Motion Picture Editors Guild.
[6] In an interview, the director John Woo, who is widely celebrated for his martial arts films, explicitly acknowledged its influence.
He and numerous other directors – John Woo, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola – have emulated Peckinpah’s slow-motion violence and realistic bloodletting.
"[4] Director Kathryn Bigelow has written of The Wild Bunch that it seemed "almost gestalt editing ... because it imploded standard theories ... and was radical and tremendously vibrant.
"[6] For The Matrix (1999, directed by The Wachowskis and edited by Zach Staenberg), Edgar-Hunt and his co-authors write that the "eye-catching violence upgrades the 'bullet ballets' of director Sam Peckinpah and the martial arts movies of Bruce Lee.
"[7] John Goodman wrote in 2011, "Peckinpah’s combination of different film speeds and his offbeat, elliptical editing style were a revelation.
John Woo, and also Takeshi Kitano and Wong Kar-Wai, have referenced Peckinpah’s innovations, but the original still packs the greatest punch for me.
"[28] Ken Dancyger notes the influence on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000, directed by Ang Lee and edited by Tim Squyres).
In the 1970s, Lombardo edited five films directed by Altman, commencing with Brewster McCloud (1970) and concluding with California Split (1974) just four years later.
The film has been called an "anti-Western"; McCabe establishes a successful brothel in a mining town, with the essential assistance of its madam, Mrs. Miller.
In 1999, Roger Ebert wrote, "Robert Altman has made a dozen films that can be called great in one way or another, but one of them is perfect, and that one is McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).
"[31] Walter Chaw has written, "The father of contemplative American classics like Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man and Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, like The Wild Bunch, packs every bit the wallop of relevance and currency that it did over three decades ago.
The frontier barroom scene that opens his McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Louis Lombardo, editor) has snippets of conversations underlying the foreground action.
A review in New York Magazine was unfavorable; "Lou Lombardo directs uninspiredly from a far from inspiring script co-authored by Tom Ardies, the original author of the novel.
[43][44] Stephen Prince has written, "Another brilliant editor of late-sixties American cinema, Lou Lombardo (who edited The Wild Bunch (1969) to seminal effect) worked sporadically in the eighties and mainly on low-key films (Moonstruck, In Country (1989)) where his editing choices showed the intelligence and subtlety that rarely wins Oscars.
The wonderful comic effectiveness and timing of Moonstruck, for example, depends as much on Lombardo's editing as on John Patrick Shanley's script or the performances by Cher, Nicolas Cage, and the rest of the cast.