The Great Road, also known as The Big Road and The Highway, 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. The Great Road is a silent film that was designed with a soundtrack, with music and sound effects added post-production. This film is another masterpiece written by Sun Yu after Wild Rose (1931) and Little Toys (1933) as 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 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 Anti-Japanese War in an "elegant and romantic" way. Sun Yu called The Great Road his "representative work".

Plot

During a famine in China, a family attempts to escape from their village for a better life. The mother does not survive the journey and dies of exhaustion on the side of the road. It is now up to the husband to take care of his son, named Jin, and make it through. He does his best to raise his son while working as a road construction worker. However, ten years later, he too eventually dies of fatigue, leaving the boy alone.