Margaret Bonfiglioli celebrates her 80th birthday this weekend and had an early present, so to speak, in a family outing at the beginning of last week to the British premiere of a new film, Mortdecai, based on a comic novel-cum-thriller written by her former husband, the one-time Oxford art dealer Kyril Bonfiglioli. He’s a man who once bought a Tintoretto for £40 and sold it for £44,000, so indeed was some expert.

Critics, let me say at once, have not been kind to the movie, which is a vehicle for the comic talents of Johnny Depp in the role of Charlie Mortdecai, a character bearing a more than passing resemblance to the late ‘Bon’, being not just an art dealer but also a gourmet, boozer and womaniser.

The one-star review in the Daily Telegraph was headlined: “Is this the worst film of 2015?”, which is clearly an absurd thing to ask at this time of the year. The headline shows, too, that the newspaper is aping the Daily Mail (“Is this a cure for cancer?”, “Is there life on Mars?”, “Is Paul Dacre about to retire?”) in asking questions to which the answer is always no.

For my part, I greatly enjoyed the film when I saw it at the first Oxford showing at the Vue last Friday, admiring Depp’s bravura performance and those of Gwyneth Paltrow as his wife Johanna and Ewan McGregor as the spook Martland, a former school colleague and (if he gets his way) love rival.

It found favour, too, with Margaret whom I met, along with daughter Amanda Bonfiglioli — an art and antiques dealer, like dad, with a stall at Oxford’s open market — at her home in Cassington two days after the premiere and two days before the damning reviews began to appear.

“It was our first premiere and turned into a wonderful family occasion,” she told me. “We were all at the hotel before the show wearing false moustaches, which I think Bon would have enjoyed.”

Moustaches play a big part in the film, particularly the one sported by the vain Charlie, which is not approved of by his missus. It leads, indeed, to a suspension of his conjugal rights.

The Poirot-like growth, in fact, does not figure in Don’t Point That Thing at Me, the first Mortdecai novel, on which the film is largely based, its plot dealing with the smuggling of a stolen Goya. It features, as can be judged by the title, in the fourth, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery, which was left uncompleted when Bon died in 1985 — of cirrhosis of the liver, perhaps not surprisingly.

The book was completed for publication by Craig Brown, one of his high-profile admirers. Others include Julian Barnes, who finds in his books “a rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness” and Stephen Fry who has said: “You couldn’t snuggle under the duvet with anything more disreputable and delightful.” I dare say he might make an exception for his new husband (or is he wife?) Elliot Spencer.

Oxford Mail:

Witty words leap from the pages of the books, which are deliberately imitative of P.G.Wodehouse and feature a Wooster/Jeeves-style relationship in Mortdecai’s dealings with his ‘thug’ servant, Jock. In the mood following the film, I reread Don’t Point That Thing at Me. I found myself constantly admiring his elegant turn of phrase, the sort or thing you might expect from a man who read English at Balliol.

At one point, after a bender, Mortdecai describes an Alka-Selzer “fussing” in its glass. Just the right word. In Something Nasty in the Woodshed he has more to say on this excellent restorative: “I have little time for foreigners but I must say that Drs Alka and Selzer should have won the Nobel Prize years ago; my only quarrel with their brainchild is its noise.”

Noise, quite properly says Margaret, is a feature of the film as of the books. “It has got a lot of explosions, of people falling out of windows and car chases. It was all so like Bon who once shot a blunderbuss up a chimney at our home in Norham Gardens.”

As one does . . .