The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene's wartime spy thriller, has been recently discussed in terms of the collective experience of the Blitz. The purpose of my essay is to further explore the relationship between the text and the context in two specific cultural areas : Fritz Lang's war films and British wartime propaganda films. Lang's Ministry of Fear is a film adaptation of Greene's novel, and adaptation studies have so far turned around the faithfulness of this transformation. Here I would like to put Lang's another war film Man Hunt before the two versions of The Ministry of Fear and explore the two-way relationship between the writer and the film director. Another context in which to put Greene's novel is British propaganda films of the Second World War. Greene has been ambivalent about propaganda. On the one hand, as a film critic he has shown his interest in the film products of the Ministry of Information as well as produced a nationalistic narration for the documentary film The New Britain. On the other hand, as a writer he has preferred to write stories with an ambivalent message. I will explore the textual ambiguity of Greene's stories such as 'The Lieutenant Died' and The Ministry of Fear and conclude that what distinguishes Greene both from British propaganda and Lang's war films is an ambivalence inherent in the representation of the enemy which resists the forceful simplification of propaganda