The Big Road

The Great Road, also known as The Big Road and The Highway, is a 1934 Chinese 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. The Great Road is a silent film with music and sound effects added in post-production. Along with Wild Rose (1931) and Little Toys (1933) the film is part of the National Defense Cinema with anti-Japanese elements. 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".

Synopsis from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Everything below written here.

Poster © the film's rights holders.