The villains of the new film are not just Hitler's Gestapo, but modern-day Austrian officials.
Morricone revolutionised the way music was used in westerns, creating a wild west soundscape of gunshots, eerie whistling, twanging guitars and dissonant harmonicas that matched the unsettling heat and tension of Leone's parched desert landscape, and its heroes and villains, portrayed through long shots and close-up cinematography.
The place turns out to be a brightly lit cell in the Ministry of Love, where O'Brien tortures Winston and reveals – as villains of fiction often do – his methods and motives.
Had the beneficiary of such largesse from another team been Alejandro Valverde, Davide Rebellin or one of the other pantomime villains of the sport, would the millions of armchair fans have been so quick to anger?
Many villains have been blamed for Mumbai's descent into urban hell, from mafia dons to impoverished migrants, but for the past three decades the main culprit is the "politician-builder nexus".
The director was responding to a question about the abundance of villains in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, which also features Jamie Foxx as Electro.
First, it would make them look even more like pantomime villains than they already do and second, there is a chance that Labour might actually win the next election," he said.
"He feels an empathy with a group of people who are characterised as villains when they are not," said Lord Bell, chairman of the Bell Pottinger PR empire.
Villains unworthy of vilification can be found in everything from the Austin Powers comedies, where the insufficiently wicked plans of Dr Evil positively drip bathos, to Skyfall, where Javier Bardem essentially played a neglected son jealous of Bond's relationship with their surrogate mother, M. Children's films have been veering this way for a while.
Meanwhile, parliamentary villains Banastre Tarleton (Ciarán Hinds) and the Duke of Clarence (Toby Jones) thwart any attempts to end slavery.
Is it some kind of weird record?" Sadly for Villains everywhere it isn't.
