Mystery Train (Mystery Train, JVC Entertainment Networks, 1989)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature” last night (Sunday, August 27) was Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train (1989), the fourth feature made by this writer-director whose movies practically define the term “idiosyncratic.” My husband Charles had expressed interest in seeing this film again – he’d watched it in the early 1990’s when it was relatively new – when I was playing the soundtrack CD to the documentary Elvis Presley: The Searcher (2019) and it contained both Junior Parker’s original recording of the song “Mystery Train” (1953) and Elvis’s cover (1955, his final record for Sun). Jarmusch’s film is actually book-ended by both those records – we hear Presley’s at the beginning and Parker’s at the end – played by a couple of late-teenage Japanese tourists, Jun (Masatochi Nagase) and his girlfriend Mitsuko (Yûki Kudô), who show up in Memphis, Tennessee to visit Graceland and the Sun Studios at 706 Union Street as part of a pilgrimage to the holy sites of the Elvis cult. Mystery Train is a film that has three different but intersecting plot lines that occur at the same time but only occasionally interact, and rather than intercut between them Jarmusch devotes a little over half an hour of screen time to each one. The only common time clues are a broadcast on a radio station that segues between Roy Orbison’s Sun record “Domino” and Elvis’s “Blue Moon” (recorded for Sun but released on RCA Victor after the big label bought Elvis’s contract in a deal which included the rights to all Elvis’s Sun recordings) and a few sound effects that originate in one story line and cross over to be heard by characters in another. Among those are the sounds of Jun and Mitsuko having sex and a gunshot fired in the Arcade Hotel, where the main part of the film takes place. The Arcade Hotel was already derelict when Jarmusch shot the film and it was torn down a year later (disappointing many film fans who travel to Memphis hoping to see it), though the Arcade Restaurant across the street not only still exists but remains in business, or at least it did as of 2010 when the Criterion Collection released the Blu-Ray disc on which we were watching the film.

The young Japanese tourist couple’s journey through Memphis – we only hear that they got to Graceland but we actually see them in the Sun studio, though later they admit to each other that they couldn’t understand what the Sun tour guide (Jodie Markell) was saying because she spoke so fast and in a to-them incomprehensible Southern accent – is one of the three stories, subtitled “Far from Yokohama.” (In an interview included as a bonus in the film, Jarmusch said he originally wanted to have them come from Osaka because Osaka is the center of Japanese rock ‘n’ roll, but his two actors were from Tokyo and couldn’t learn the unique Osaka accent in time.) They also argue throughout the movie over who was better, Elvis or Carl Perkins; Mitsuko insists Elvis was the one and only “King,” while Jun says Perkins was better. (In the interview Jarmusch says Perkins was a better guitar player but Elvis a better singer, and I’d agree with that but also give Perkins points for writing most of his own songs, which Elvis didn’t.) The second plot line, “A Ghost,” concerns Luisa (Nicoletta Braschi), an Italian woman who is planning to fly out of Memphis with a coffin containing her late husband’s remains. (Jarmusch said he’d been asked if the corpse was supposed to be that of Roberto Benigni, Braschi’s real-life husband. He replied, “I hope not!”) She meets up with a con man (Tom Noonan) who accosts her in the Arcade Restaurant and offers to sell her a comb he says he got from Elvis personally (remember that Elvis had been dead for only 12 years when this film was made) for $20, which she gives him but only to get him to go away. Then Luisa meets Dee Dee (Elizabeth Bracco), a woman who says she’s stuck in an abusive relationship with a boyfriend and is planning to move to Natchez, Mississippi to get away from him. Since the rooms at the Arcade Hotel cost $22 per night each, and Dee Dee doesn’t have the money, Luisa offers to split the charge with her and the two spend a rather uneasy night together. At one point Luisa sees a ghost of Elvis in their room and wakes Dee Dee to show it to her – only, you guessed it, as soon as Dee Dee recovers consciousness and gets angry with Luisa for waking her up, the ghost is gone. Later the two hear the sounds of Jun and Mitsuko in the room upstairs having sex with each other, and one of the women dismissively says, “They’re fucking.”

The third plot line, “Lost in Space,” is by far the most interesting (and the one Charles remembered the most from the last time he’d seen this film). It’s about three small-time crooks, two white – Johnny (Joe Strummer, formerly of The Clash, who shows real promise as an actor here) and Charlie (the young Steve Buscemi in his 15th feature film) – and one Black. The three hang out in a combination bar and pool hall called “Shades,” and when Johnny upsets his friends by showing up with a loaded revolver, the three go out to a liquor store – where Johnny pulls out his gun and holds up the place. When the store clerk attempts to resist, Johnny shoots him, leaving the other two fearful that the clerk will die and all three will face a murder rap. They go to the Arcade and demand from the desk clerk (played by the great 1950’s R&B singer “Screamin’” Jay Hawkins) that he hide them out. He sticks them in Room 22, the grungiest spot by far in this already grungy hotel, where Johnny threatens to kill himself, Charlie tries to stop him, They Both Reach for the Gun and Charlie ends up wounded in the leg big–time – the source of the gunshot Luisa and Dee Dee heard. Strummer and Hawkins aren’t the only professional musicians in the film; Rufus Thomas appears as a man at the train station where Jun and Mitsuko arrive, and Tom Waits plays the radio station D.J. in the main sequence that links all three plots. (Waits had previously acted for Jarmusch in the 1986 film Down by Law, and though he was actually seen in that one while in Mystery Train only his voice is heard, Jarmusch insists it was the same character.) Waits also announces on his radio show that the police are looking for a gang of three, two white and one Black, and naturally the crooks hear that and get scared. They needn’t be because they easily evade the cops, whom we see go tearing off in the wrong direction. It ends with Dee Dee on the train to Natchez, Luisa on the plane to Rome, and Jun and Mitsuko aboard a train to heaven knows where with cassette players blasting Junior Parker’s original “Mystery Train” in their ears.

I liked Mystery Train, though it didn’t move me or stir my emotional depths the way the greatest films do. I give Jarmusch points for using just eight original records (Parker’s and Presley’s “Mystery Train,” Orbison’s “Domino,” Elvis’s “Blue Moon,” Rufus Thomas’s “The Memphis Train,” Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Get Your Money Where You Spend Your Time,” Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart” and The Bar-Kays’ “Soul Finger”) instead of drowning the film in cool music cues as, he admits, he was tempted to do – he joked the soundtrack album could have been a five-CD set. The movie is a surprisingly quiet, restrained work – Charles said that when he first saw it he expected something wilder, more “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” – reflecting Jarmusch’s sensibility and his odd love of lowlife characters. The disc also contained a brief documentary on the Memphis music scene and in particular how many of the landmarks in the city’s musical history have been destroyed – including most of Beale Street, razed by a racist city government after Rev. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, 1968, as well as the converted movie theatre where most of the Stax soul classics were recorded. The mini-doc features Rufus Thomas making his fabled complaint that once Elvis hit the big time, Sun Records owner Sam Phillips almost overnight dropped almost all his Black artists and signed only whites from then on. So Thomas, who had been on the first Sun Records release – “Bear Cat,” an “answer record” to Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton’s “Hound Dog” (later also covered by Elvis, though Thornton’s “Hound Dog” is so much better the records practically inhabit different universes) – went to Stax, became one of their first hit-makers, and brought his daughter Carla Thomas to Stax as well.