The Big Road

Jasmine(Li Lilli) and Ding Xiang(Chen Yen-yen) in the film

During a time of famine in China, a family attempts to escape from their village for a better life. The mother doesn't make it on the journey and dies on the side of the road. It is now up to the husband to take care of his son and make it through. The husband does his best to raise his son, working as a road construction worker. He eventually dies of fatigue, leaving the boy alone.

Twenty years later the boy, Brother Jin, has grown up to be a road construction worker like his father. He and his friends - Old Zhang, Zhang Da, Little Luo, and Zheng Junli, are having trouble finding work in the city after being fired for a quarrel between Brother Jin and Old Zhang. As they search for employment, they meet Little Six, a former thief who joins their group. The group decide to join the road construction team to contribute to building a military road. During their travels through China constructing the road, the group meets two women — Ding Xiang and Jasmine. As the military situation in the area grows more intense, the workers and soldiers stay up all night together constructing the road.

Eventually, the enemy approaches Hu, a local rich man, and persuades him to convince the men to stop building the road. Hu invites Brother Jin and his friends to a banquet at his house and offers them goods in an attempt to persuade them to stop construction. Brother Jin and his friends refuse Hu's request. The six workers are imprisoned in Hu's dungeon, tied up, beaten and tortured. Dingxiang and Jasmine suspect something may have happened when the men don't return from the banquet. The next day, Dingxiang and Jasmine rescue Brother Jin and the others. Jasmine seduces Hu to distract him. The girls threaten one of the servant with scissors, to bring them to where the prisoners are. Jasmine throws the scissors to Brother Jin to cut himself free. Dingxiang goes to inform Chief Liu and the army, and get help. Brother Jin cuts himself free, and tries to cut Old Zhang free too. He is caught by the guard, and Old Zhang is struck by a flying knife. The army and other workers rally to go to Hu's house and rescue them. They force themselves into the house, and capture Hu.

After everyone returns to the village, the local garrison reports and punishes the traitors. Once the group begin working on the road again an enemy plane suddenly attacks and kills most of the workers along with Brother Jin and his friends. Dingxiang stands with her father in the aftermath of the attack, and watches as the superimposed images of the dead workers rise up and continue to work on the road.

The film's historical background is the Manchurian Invasion by the Japanese military, which is exemplified through song and subtle character details.

The Great Road is generally thought to be a leftist film for characteristics such as opposition against invasion and suppression, positive portray of lower classes, and collective violence.[7][8] The scholar Chris Berry compares the Chinese leftist films of the thirties, including The Big Road, to the third cinema for their shared characteristics, such as anti-imperialism and portray of lower class.[8] It is the first Chinese film that features workers as the protagonists.[9] The names of the characters alone show strong tight to the people of the grassroot class.[9]

The patriotic narrative is in constant tension with visual pleasure in Sun's films after 1933 (The Little Toys (Playthings), Queen of Sports (Sports Queen), The Big Road), diverting the woman's bodily display from the intimate space of heterosexuality to a more open site.[7][9][10] Women's bodies became a public site of propaganda.[10] Under the struggle between patriotic discourse and visual pleasure, women characters in these films went far beyond the male (as the subject) and female (as the object) binary gender matrix.[11]

Chris Berry relates the "oddball figure" of Li Lili's character, Moli, in Big Road to her character in Such Luxury and suggests that Moli can be read as a partly unprecedented type, as well as a re-inscription of types like the Wudan, the female warrior of opera in China.[10] Ding Xiang, on the other hand, represents a classic filial daughter that is consistent with traditional Chinese value.[10]

This film takes a bold attempt in gender perspective, where it shows shots of male bodies through a woman's eyes.[12] In these scenes, the filmmakers twist the conventional position of male being the "subject" and female the "object" on the screen. In addition, the film includes a vague implication of homosexuality between women, represented in the scene where Jasmine and Ding Xiang hug and kiss each other when laying in the same chair.[9] However, the message may be delusive since their dialogue consists of topics about the males.[13] These unconventional approaches of Sun Yu's "Chop Suey" style are thought to show western influence.[14]

There are two types of love portrayed in the film: the explicit love between Xiao Luo and Ding Xiang, and the implicit and more restrained love between Brother Jin and Jasmine. The latter is vaguely shown at the very end of the film when they finally held hands after death. Moreover, the Chinese concept of family is firmly anchored in two relationships in the film – the individual-family relationship and the nation-family relationship.[15]

Scholar Hye Seung Chung suggests that The Big Road is an allegory of Sino-Korean unity, one that was founded upon a common resistance against the Japanese Empire at the time of the film's release and embodied by the films Korean-born star Jin Yan.[14]

The film includes four dubbed songs, including the theme song, "Song of the Great Road" (大路歌), composed by Nie Er, with lyrics by Sun Yu. Asides from expressing of the tramps of the road builders, they believe the song should emphasize more on the vigorous spirit of the fight for freedom and liberation of the contemporary youth with a heavy responsibility.

The song that road builders and the villagers are gathered in the inn, and Jasmine sings for them is a traditional folk song about the hardships and suffering of the ordinary Chinese people. The lyrics appear in subtitles at the base of the frame in Chinese characters while Jasmine sings, as is the convention in Chinese film.[16]

The Great Road is a masterpiece of the left-wing national defense film and is one of the most mature works of Chinese silent film art. The movie possesses a strong plot as well as aesthetic images. Accompanied by Director Sun Yu’s instructive directing style, The Great Road inspired the younger generations and motivated their determination to achieve the sole anti-Japanese objective.

The Great Road was sent to the (1935) Moscow International Film Festival as one of China's first films to participate in. However, to avoid the obstruction of the northeast Japanese invaders, the movie was detoured in Moscow, and could not be in the film festival. ("Song of The Fishermen" was delivered on time and won the "honorary award"). The unique artistic style of "The Great Road" has won the attention and praise of foreign audiences and critics. For example, at the China Film Retrospective Exhibition held in London in 1985, The Big Road was promoted by the British industry. History proves that "The Big Road" is an exemplary film in Classical Chinese cinema.[17]

The film expresses a strong patriotic message, but due to national policy for advocating peace and tolerance, the film cannot directly address Japan as their enemy. In order to avoid the censorship of the film by the two government censorship agencies in Nanjing and Shanghai. The script of The Great Road tried to avoid the prohibited words, and writes "Japanese imperialism" as "enemy country", "Japanese aggression invades China" as "advancing artillery fire", and changes "Chinese land" to "the land of weak nations" ", writing "resistance against Japan and salvation" as "resistance for self-rescue", "war for survival of the nation", prompting "a large area of land" to the occupied Northeast China, etc. Despite this, the patriotic sentiment of the film is also very incisive, the message remain clear, and the national song composer Nie Er made several songs for the film.

The film is available on YouTube with English subtitles translated by Christopher Rea.[1]

The film was released as The Big Road in the United States on Region 0 DVD on May 8, 2007 by Cinema Epoch. The disc featured English subtitles and also included Sun Yu's Queen of Sports.

• List of Chinese films of the 1930s
• Nudity in film (East Asian cinema since 1929)
• Long March (related to The Big Road)
• Second Sino-Japanese War
• Burma Road (a highway constructed during the Second Sino-Japanese War)

Xiaolian小莲, Peng彭 (2017). "The Temperature of Celluloid 胶片的温度". Shanghai Literature (5).

Laikwan Pang, Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937, Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc 2002.

Christopher Rea. Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949. Columbia University Press, 2021.

Sun, Shaoyi (2002). "Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937". Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002.

Farquar, M., and Y. Zhang (2011). Chinese Film Stars. London: Routledge.

Edwin Mak, When Change Meant Change: Revisiting 1930s Chinese Leftist Cinema, MUBI.

Ying Gui, Making films with the enemy: Chinese collaborationist filmmakers in Manchukuo, 1937-1945. University of British Columbia, 2018.

Zhou, Cui. Scenes of The Turbulent Days: On The 1930s Chinese Leftist Film Movement. University of California, 2016.

Berry, Chris. "The Sublimative Text: Sex and Revolution in Big Road." East-West Film Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2, June 1988.

• The Great Road with English subtitles on YouTube
• The Big Road at IMDb
• The Big Road is available for free download at the Internet Archive
• The Big Road on OpenEdition
• The Big Road on Wikidata
• Dalu summary from the University of California, San Diego
• 大路_(1935年电影)on Wikidata