Welles vs. Hitchcock

From pinoydvd:

rse: I like Hitchcock movies a lot.  My only problem is that most of his movies look “stagy”.  He rarely shoots on location.  That makes his movies look more like stage plays.  I prefer Orson Welles’ more free-style kind of film making.  I also think that Welles edits more fluidly than Hitchcock.

Welles does great editing--even more so in later films than in earlier ones. But Hitchcock, control freak that he is, preferred the kind of perfection he can find in studio sets. Sometimes that hermetic, antiseptic look helps him--in Psycho, for example, the impossibly clean bathroom seems all the more defiled when blood splatters on its walls. In most of his films, actually, the stylized artificial look, so comforting, so placid and featureless, is really a prelude to the mayhem to come.

Welles rarely had that kind of luxury after The Magnificent Ambersons--he had to find his atmsphere wherever he can, and shoot it quickly before the crowds came, or the fog lifts, or whatever. There's great atmsophere in his films, but it's a different kind.

Welles and Hitchcock, they're very different flavors, great in their own unique ways.