High Life of Harlem

Heroma is a raw little minority report on the narcotics trade in Manhattan's Spanish Harlem, made by a group of talented Puerto Ricans. Spoken in Spanish with English subtitles (plus a peppering of Anglo-Saxon vulgarisms), the film is mainly distinguished for acting untouched by the naive semiprofessionalism that blights many a small-budget movie. Topping the cast is Jaime Sanchez as Chico, a well-to-do but restless cat who sums up his birthright by stating his birthplace: "102nd and Lexington."

Sanchez' appealingly altered portrait of a young junkie and dope pusher evokes sympathy mainly by pushing the film's thesis that most such cases stem from "lack of affection." Producer-Director Jeronimo Mitchell Melendez ignores complex social and psychological factors when he suggests that most addicts turn to the needle to tranquilize Oedipal anguish. But despite his sociological hokum, he projects a sordid milieu with grim documentary accuracy.

After doing time on a drug rap, Chico comes home chastened, then stumbles into every conceivable temptation. His parents object to the company he keeps, so he moves in with a chic call girl, played by fiery Mexican Beauty Kitty de Hoyos, whose claim to fame loses nothing in translation. Because his hooker cannot support both him and her drug habit forever, Chico starts peddling heroin, ultimately resumes using it.

Though crudely plotted, the movie offers some bruising glimpses of the drug addict's world. Director Mitchell turns his camera into streets alive with the ruthless, luckless desperation of hung-up types waiting to score. There is powerful understatement in an eerily casual police raid on a pad full of bleary, turned-on junkies, or in Sanchez' dry heaves when he goes to collect a shipment of "stuff" and finds it sharing a coffin with a stiff. Heroina is not much fun to sit through, but the best of it throws a cold clear light into one of Manhattan's open wounds.

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