The Third Man Looking Through a Feminist Lens

In the movie, The Third Man, we observe how Holly Martins tries to hold power over the other characters. Looking through a feminist lens, we can see how  the character of  Ms. Schmidt instead holds power over Holly Martins because of her advantage of knowing the language that is being spoken. Ms. Anna Schmidt who was Mr. Harry Lime’s lover lives in Vienna and speaks the native language of German quite fluently along with English. Martins tries to make it seem that Ms. Schmidt needs him in order to figure out the murder case of Mr. Harry Lime. When really, Martins himself needs Ms. Schmidt to translate all that is said to him because he doesn’t know how to speak German. Throughout the scenes during Martins’ investigating, we see how he depends upon Ms. Schmidt for many translations of words spoken by different people who are being questioned by him. One scene in particular was when the Porter dies and the little boys reveals to the surrounding crowd that it was Martins who murdered him. The boy yells in German, “Papa der ist der murder!” translating to “Papa there is the murder!” and points to Martins. While this is happening Martins the whole time is begging Ms. Schmidt for a translation so he can understand what is happening and what it being said. Looking inside the shot  and what is happening, we see how the camera angles also make Martins look the same height and even shorter than the surrounding characters . This indicates how he has no higher power than the surrounding people including Ms. Schmidt. Not being able to understand what the boy is saying shows as a weakness of Martins and a strength for Ms. Schmidt all at the same time. Here we see how Martins fails in defining the roles of masculinity by being dependent upon Ms. Schmidt and therefore her holding power over him.