The purpose of this essay is to reconsider Graham Greene's novel It's a Battlefield (1934) in terms of its relationship to modernism, cinema and politics. On the one hand, I shall compare Greene's novel with Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent (1907), an early modernist novel whose settings, characters and narrative structure Greene unashamedly borrowed for a construction of his late modernist novel. What these two writers share is the cinematic writing style, a fundamentally literary technique enabled by the use of so-called free indirect style. What distinguishes them from each other, however, is the difference of the media situations they were in. What makes Greene's novel truly cinematic is not only the use of free indirect style, but also the refreshing cinematic sensitivity to sights and sounds, a product of the talkie revolution spreading globally in the late 1920s. In order to make the point that Greene's novel is deeply cinematic, I shall compare Greene's It's a Battlefield with Rene Clair's À nous la liberté (1931), a talkie film whose ideas of the similarity of prison and factory Greene borrowed for the beginning sections of his novel. Greene's subtle appropriation of Clair's cinematic ideas makes him a fully-fledged satirist of the capitalist regime as well as a cinematic modern writer.