General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Big Li, Little Li and Old Li

Big Li, Little Li and Old Li (Da li, xiao li he lao li; 大李小李和老李) is a 1962 Chinese sports comedy directed by Xie Jin and produced by the Tianma Film Studio, in which three workers at a Shanghai meat processing plant, all surnamed Li, take different attitudes toward the factory's physical-fitness campaign.¹ It was Xie Jin's only comedy in a career otherwise built on drama and melodrama.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writers	Directed by Xie Jin (谢晋); script by Yu Ling, Ye Ming, Xie Jin, Liang Tingjing, and Wu Li¹
Production / release	Tianma Film Studio, Shanghai; completed in 1961, released January 1, 1962¹^•³
Cast	Liu Xiasheng (Big Li), Fan Haha (Old Li), Yao Debing (Little Li), Guan Hongda (the strongman)¹^•⁴
Format	Color; 1.33:1 aspect ratio; sources give running times of 82 and 89 minutes¹^•⁵
Languages	Shot with the actors speaking Shanghainese, but publicly released in Mandarin post-dubbed because recording synchronized sound exceeded the budget³
Purpose	Made to mark the tenth anniversary of Mao Zedong's directive to "develop physical culture and sports and strengthen the people's physiques"²
Restoration	A 2K restoration with newly recorded Shanghainese dubbing premiered at the Shanghai International Film Festival on June 17, 2018; a new 4K restoration followed in 2021⁶^•²

Spoilers

Plot

The three Lis work at a meat processing factory in Shanghai. Big Li is the union chairman, warm-hearted and a model worker, but in poor physical condition because he never exercises; rainy weather leaves him with aching joints, so neighbors use him as a walking weather forecast, and his nickname is "Weather Station".¹ Old Li, the workshop director, believes work matters a hundred times more than sports and disapproves of his son Little Li, an enthusiast who wants the whole factory exercising; a strongman co-worker who considers his own muscles proof that sport is useless joins Old Li in indifference.¹

Little Li and like-minded colleagues decide to elect a chairman of the factory sports association. Old Li and the strongman scheme to nominate Big Li, expecting him to fail and the campaign to peter out; instead Big Li takes the job seriously and makes Old Li uncomfortable.¹ In the China Film Archive synopsis, Big Li asks Old Li to do the radio calisthenics broadcast with him; Old Li ducks into the cold store, where Little Li accidentally locks him in. Shivering, Old Li starts doing calisthenics to warm up, discovers that exercise helps, and later becomes a tai chi practitioner who competes at a sports meet; the factory's athletic program then flourishes.⁵ The cold-storage sequence and Big Li's clumsy first attempts at broadcast calisthenics rely almost entirely on physical performance and are often singled out as among the most memorable moments in Chinese comedy film.⁷

Production

The film grew out of the mass fitness campaigns of the early 1960s. Screenwriter Yu Ling is credited with the idea after reading a report that the meat processing plant in the Longhua district of Shanghai had won a title as an advanced unit in physical exercise.³ The sports authority's account of the film's background names Li Fuhao, a senior leader of the Shanghai meat processing plant, as the prototype for Old Li; by his account the factory had more than 2,000 workers doing broadcast calisthenics in shifts beginning at 7 a.m., and the plant was named a national advanced unit for mass sports in 1958 and 1959.⁸

Xie Jin filled the cast with stars of Shanghai's huaji (slapstick comic theater), including Liu Xiasheng, Fan Haha, and Wen Binbin, and the actors performed their parts in Shanghainese.²^•³ Cost constraints made synchronized sound recording impossible, so the dialogue was dubbed afterward in Mandarin and released that way; the original Shanghainese track survived.³ Several cast members of the 1958 slapstick film Sanmao, the Student, such as Wen Binbin and Fan Haha, reappeared here in different roles.⁹ Critics note that the pairing of the tall Guan Hongda (the strongman) and the short Fan Haha (Old Li) carried forward the classic comedy double-act tradition of silent-era Chinese and American film.⁷

The film opened in a year of exceptional comedy output: a film-industry chronicle lists 1962 as a peak year with five comedies, including Li Shuangshuang, Extraordinary Events, The Lady Barber, Brothers, and this film.¹⁰

Place in Xie Jin's career and in film history

Xie Jin (1923–2008) directed about 36 films between 1948 and 2003 and is remembered for Woman Basketball Player No. 5, The Red Detachment of Women, Hibiscus Town, and other dramas.⁷^•¹¹ Big Li, Little Li and Old Li stands apart in that record as his only comedy, and scholars writing about it classify it among the relatively rare PRC sports films while also noting its ties to Shanghai comic theater and the Shanghai "haipai" tradition of filmmaking.²^•¹²

Film histories of Chinese sports cinema group it with the ten sports-themed films made before 1966, a run that included Woman Basketball Player No. 5 (1957) and Daughter of the Sea (1959) and produced what one survey calls a creative peak for the genre.¹³ The critic Hu Ke, a professor at the Communication University of China's film school, has read it as a combination of the two main comedy forms of 1950s and 1960s mainland China, satire and celebratory comedy, and has called its non-realistic experiment in the cold-storage sequence an early form of the grotesque comedy in Chinese film.¹⁴ For viewers in Shanghai the film also has documentary value: one account describes it as rare film documentation of the city in 1962 and possibly the only existing footage of the city's Art Deco slaughterhouse while it was still in use.¹¹

Restoration and the Shanghainese versions

The film now exists in three spoken forms: the 1962 Mandarin public release, a newly dubbed Shanghainese version, and the preserved original Shanghainese soundtrack.¹⁵ For the film's 2018 restoration, timed to the tenth anniversary of Xie Jin's death, the picture was repaired in 2K, the music was re-recorded, and new Shanghainese dubbing was recorded with the actors Xu Zheng (Big Li), Zheng Kai (Little Li), and the comic performer Shu Yue (Old Li), supported by well-known Shanghai media and stage figures.³ This version premiered at the Shanghai Film Palace on June 17, 2018, in the festival's "Tribute to the Masters" series.⁶ A separate 2K restoration of the original soundtrack version was completed by the China Film Archive and shown in academic screenings, including a late-2017 showing in Beijing where northern audiences, far from complaining about the dialect, judged the Shanghainese performances to complete the film.¹⁵ In 2021 the Shanghai International Film Festival, together with Migu Video, commissioned the China Film Archive to produce a new 4K restoration.²

Both restored versions met strong demand. The 2018 Shanghainese dub premiere sold out as soon as tickets opened, and a 2019 revival of the "original sound" version at the Da Guangming Cinema in Shanghai was described as instant sellout with a full house.⁹^•¹⁵ Among Chinese film-site audiences the restored classic retains a high standing: Douban users rated it 8.1 out of 10 on the basis of 9,146 ratings as of September 15, 2024.¹⁴

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026