| The Big Road | |
|---|---|
 Ding Xiang in The Great Road with Little Luo | |
| Directed by | Sun Yu |
| Written by | Sun Yu |
| Produced by | Lu Jie Lo Ming Yau |
| Starring | Jin Yan Li Lili Zheng Junli Chen Yen-yen |
| Cinematography | Hong Weilie |
| Music by | Nie Er Sun ShiYi |
Production company | |
Release date |
|
Running time | 104 min |
| Country | China |
| Language | Mandarin Chinese |
The Great Road (Chinese: 大路; pinyin: Dàlù), also known as The Big Road and The Highway,[1] is a 1934 Chinese silent film directed by Sun Yu, produced in 1934 and released on January 1, 1935. The film stars Jin Yan and Li Lili, and was produced by Sun Yu specifically for Li Lili to capitalize on her image and rising popularity.[2] The Great Road is a silent film with music and sound effects added in post-production.[3][4] Along with Wild Rose (1931) and Little Toys (1933) the film is part of the National Defense Cinema with anti-Japanese elements.[5] While it was critically dubbed as a "hard film", Sun Yu made no explicit references to the fact that “the enemy nation” in the film was Japan, and the film contained no direct confrontation with “the enemy” on a battlefield, under the Kuomintang government's censorship policy designed to prevent provoking the Japanese. Instead, he used the building of a road to defeat "the enemy" invaders to express the spirit of the Second Sino-Japanese War in an "elegant and romantic" way. Sun Yu called The Great Road his "representative work".[6]
The Great Road was named the 30th greatest Chinese film ever made by the Hong Kong Film Awards in 2004.[7]
- ^ Christopher Rea, Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 (Columbia University Press, 2021), ch. 5.
- ^ "BFI: Five Iconic Chinese Actresses".
- ^ Chinese Film Classics online course, Module 4: The Great Road (1934): https://chinesefilmclassics.org/course/module-4-the-great-road-1934/
- ^ David Carter (2010). East Asian Cinema. Kamera Books. ISBN 9781842433805.
- ^ Pang, Laikwan (May 2002). Building a New China in Cinema: The Chinese Left-Wing Cinema Movement, 1932-1937. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 9780742572225.
- ^ Christopher Rea, Chinese Film Classics, 1922-1949 (Columbia University Press, 2021), chapter 5.
- ^ "Welcome to the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards". 24th Annual Hong Kong Film Awards. Archived from the original on 2019-10-22. Retrieved 2007-04-10.