During their travels, the group befriends two vivacious and attractive women at a roadside restaurant – Ding Xiang (Orchid) and Jasmine.

As the roadwork comes closer to the front, the situation grows more intense, requiring workers and soldiers to stay up all night together to construct the road.

Jasmine throws the scissors to Brother Jin to cut himself free as Ding Xiang retreats to get help from Chief Liu and the army.

After the carnage, Ding Xiang stands alone with her father as the spirits of her dead friends rise and continue their labour while joyfully singing.

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.

[10] The scholar Chris Berry compares the Chinese leftist films of the thirties, including The Big Road, to the third cinema for their similar characteristics of anti-imperialism and lower class portrayals.

As Situ Huimin recalls: "We denounced him as surrendering to the KMT as he [Sun Yu] did not clearly show his anti-KMT position in the film".

[12] Scholar Hye Seung Chung suggests that The Big Road is an allegory of Sino-Korean unity, founded upon a common resistance against the Japanese Empire when the film's Chinese release.

[13] Actor Jin Yan (Kim Yôm) embodies the anticolonial spirit through his performance in resistance films such as The Big Road.

The film provided Kim with an alternative avenue to express anti-Japanese sentiments held by Koreans whose freedom of speech, native language, and historical traditions were lost or forbidden in occupied Korea.

[12] The films patriotic narrative produces constant tension with the 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.

[14] 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.

[15] 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.

[14] This film takes a bold attempt in gender perspective, where it shows shots of male bodies through a woman's eyes.

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 lying in the same chair.

[20] Aside from expressing 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.

[citation needed] The theme song is repeated multiple times throughout the film as a transition between scenes of road construction.

At the end of the film, "Song of the Great Road" reemerges as the dead workers are brought back to life as joyful and lively spectral beings.

However, to avoid the obstruction of the northeast Japanese invaders, the movie was detoured in Moscow, and could not be in the film festival.

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.