Some Like It Sweet: Dench Swings With ‘Bombshells’

Judi Dench wailing on tenor sax? Leslie Caron pounding the bass? Olympia Dukakis on trumpet? Now that’s music.

First-run independent films are now on HBO’s agenda, witness tonight’s arrival of Alan Plater’s slight but charming comedy about a nearly all-female swing band that reinvents itself 56 years after playing in London as German bombs fell on the city in World War II.

Although those were grim times, there’s nothing dark about “The Last of the Blonde Bombshells,” least of all the wigs on band members as part of their costumes in flashbacks of them playing dance music for soldiers and others in 1944.

The band’s name is the Blonde Bombshells, and its rebirth appears to be at hand, thanks to the efforts of just-widowed Elizabeth (Dench), who sets out to find the other former Bombshells with the intent of re-forming the group in time to play her 12-year-old granddaughter’s school dance.

At Elizabeth’s side once more is Patrick (Ian Holm), the band’s lovably larcenous drummer and only male. It turns out that the bandstand was not the only place where Patrick and his fellow Bombshells (except for Elizabeth) made music together. Nor has advancing codger-dom diminished his libido.

This is somewhat of a nostalgia piece, with director Gillies Mackinnon allowing sentiment without schmaltz and never trying to force or go too far with the gentle humor in Plater’s teleplay. How can you not smile, though, while watching white-haired Dench appear to play jazz with a street musician as if being cool were her life?

It’s a small flaw that none of the cast appears quite old enough (they’d have to be in their 70s) to have Bombshelled through the 1940s. Elizabeth and Patrick learn that some of the former band members have died, in fact. One is in jail, another in the Salvation Army.

Emerging one by one, though, are bass-playing Madeline (Caron), alto sax player Evelyn (Billie Whitelaw), Betty on the ivories (Joan Sims), Annie on her trombone (June Whitfield), Gwen the vocalist (British singer Cleo Laine, still hitting the high notes) and hard-talking, hard-drinking Dinah the horn player (Dukakis).

“I can see why the Germans bombed you,” says Elizabeth’s granddaughter when the Bombshells began rehearsing chaotically. Is a comeback really in their future? Does woogie follow boogie?

* “The Last of the Blonde Bombshells” will be shown tonight at 9 on HBO. The network has rated it TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children).