G.O.A.T. Villains. No. 22 - Ralph Cifaretto (The Sopranos)

The villain you hate to love.

For anyone who missed the last entry in the G.O.A.T. Villains series, you can check out numbers 23 (Mola Ram), 24 (Clarence Boddicker) & 25 (Bohdi).

Entry no.25 also carries an explainer re: criteria.

And now, No. 22, with just a quick warning: either via quotes from the series or reference to images, there may be some graphic content - & language - ahead.

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Ralph is the first TV villain to enter the G.O.A.T. list, but certainly not the last.

Seasoned character actor Joe Pantoliano brings all his talent for playing shady, acerbic sociopaths to probably the greatest series ever produced on the medium, The Sopranos.

Creator David Chase’s Emmy-winning show was notable for many things, not least its nuanced depiction of the verisimiltude of villainy, and the many faces it wears.

In 2003 Pantoliano picked up an Emmy for his role as mafioso Ralph Cifaretto. Like many of the actors and actresses appearing in the series, it was a world he was familiar with - his stepfather, Florio Isabella, had links to the Genovese crime family.

“Once, in a New York restaurant” Pantoliano told the Guardian, “I met this connected old man who ran the neighbourhood. When I told him who my stepfather was, he said: ‘Fuck The Sopranos – he was a real wiseguy!’”

But ‘Joey Pants’ as he’s known in the industry, also described him as “the sweetest wiseguy I ever met” in his autobigraphy Who’s Sorry Now.

There was certainly no trace of sweet Florio in Pantiolano’s depiction of Ralph Cifaretto, a scheming, wise-cracking, wild-eyed, Machiavelian mobster, who’s sometimes so outrageously despicable and selfish, that you can’t help - much like a Clarence Boddicker - but laugh at his flamboyant antics.

In my design of putting Ralph together, I always decided that he was sexually abused by his alcoholic mother’s boyfriends, that he was addicted to watching The Godfather, and that he really wanted to be Michael Corleone. That’s why I had him wear those ascots. I said to David [Chase, Sopranos creator] that I didn’t want to look like those other guys. I wanted to look like a politician. Ralph was gonna be in business with politicians so I wanted to be able to fit in, in that way. That was the part he was playing.

Indeed he is the ‘numbers man’ that New York mobster Jonny Sack describes as ‘more creative than Spielberg’. The wit who flips a Winston Churchill line to wind up Paulie (“Today I’m late but tomorrow I’ll be on time. You’ll be stupid forever”). The crook who warns Native American protest leader, Professor Del Redclay, to stop the ‘protest he’s spearheading.’

But what he really is, like much of the Sopranos cast, is a potent means for throwing into relief the various shades and sympathies of the show’s undoubted star, James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano.

The beauty of an anti-hero like Tony, who frequently leaves you breathless with his self-interest and callousness, is that in order to maintain any semblance of empathy with him, we need these contrasts offered up by a coterie of adjacent baddies, many of whom are often on his own team, yet will happily cross a line that Tony’s sensibilites will not let him transgress.

Pantoliano confirmed the only mandate David Chase had for the character:

“They’re all scumbags,” David said, “but this guy’s a real scumbag. I want him to be charming and funny.”

Ralphie: I’ve come to reclaim Rome for my people!

He’s the guy a room full of psychopaths roll their eyes at when he enters the Bada Bing nightclub, swinging a metal chain above his head he imagines is a flail from Gladiator. Parroting Maximus Meridius like a child in his bedroom as he viciously parlays and plays and catches perennial hapless victim Georgie in the eye with it.

We are moments away from the murder of Tracee. A brutal event that no watcher of the series will ever forget, and which, for all it’s sickening barbarity, added huge dramatic weight to, not just the episode University, but the true conflict playing out between a villain and anti-hero.

Tracee, in an episode which juxtaposes Meadow Soprano’s matriculation with an impressionable dancer who gets caught up in the game (and just happens to be young, dark-haired and beautiful like his daughter), playing on Tony’s repressed guilt and empathy, becomes, like Jackie Junior later on in Series Three, a fight for the soul of youth itself.

In his own words, David Chase was being deliberate with the shock of University; had felt viewers were getting too cozy, too caught up in the criminal glamour of the series’ protagonists and wanted to ram home what despicable people they were truly supposed to be.

There is much depravity in the episode as a result of it. Heightened by effective contrast - we see Tracee wishing to give Tony a cake she’s baked to say thank you for advice he gave her about her young son, see her showing off her new braces to him, while only moments later Ralphie is roughly taking her from behind, forcing her head to the crotch of a policeman who warns her to “watch the braces honey.”

“Are you crying?” says Ralphie, “I’ll give you something to cry about”.

Then she’s waiting on him diligently at home. He’s disinterested, fulminating at his television whilst trying to get his Gladiator fix via Spartacus. “They didn’t have flat-tops in ancient Rome!” he screams at the TV, as Silvio appears to drag Tracee back to work, to the Bing.

Chase cuts from Ralphie chortling at the window as she’s manhandled and slapped, to him laughing at the Soprano dinner table behind manners and badinage - mimicking Gladiator once more to guffaws from AJ and holding court next to his partner, Rosalie (Ro), Jackie Junior’s mother.

Ralphie: Why was I born handsome instead of rich?

When he murders Tracee, who humiliates him in the Bing and calls him less than a man, it’s not just the crescendo of violence that marks him as dangerous psychopath, it’s the fact he sells her a dream first.

“We’ll have a baby and get married” he coos like a man in love. “Hey, if it's a boy, we'll name him after me. If it's a girl, we'll name it Tracee after you. Then she can grow up to be a dick sucking slob just like her mother.” She strikes him and incites his murderous rage.

“She slipped,” he smugly tells the Bing whilst icing his bloody knuckles.

We are all of us Tony Soprano when he rams his fist into Ralphie’s face, and breaks one of the unwritten codas of their order: you don’t put hands on a Made Man.

Everyone tells Tony he has to make amends, but it’s the last thing he wants to do. And, not for the first or last time, Tony is the only one we’re rooting for.

He’s then faced with a conundrum after the ignominous, toilet-mounted death of Gigi Cestone in the Aprile Crew. Everyone from Silvio to Jonny Sacks kibitzes - urging Tony to promote the guy who makes far more money than the rest of his foot soldiers, thereby rewarding a monster who just stoved a girls head in with his bare hands.

The alternative is to install a capo not fit for purpose, and risk losing Ralphie’s loyalty and - considerable - income.

Ultimately he has no choice, so begrudingly promotes a, just barely, contrite (“It was the coke. I was doing to much coke.”) Ralph Cifaretto - but refuses to celebrate or even really acknowledge him.

“I need to hear it was merit and not just because someone was constipated and blew a gasket” Ralph tells Tony.

Who duly leaves him at the table.

The resentment lingers. It’s then that Ralph’s violence retreats to the shadows. Mutates. Into a form of machiavelianism not seen since Tony’s mother Livia died. Casually dropping pitch-perfect insinuations to Jackie Junior - who Tony is urging to stay in school - gets him a gun, glamourises the life, sucks him in, culminating in a story he tells them about a heist pulled by Tony and his father, Jackie Aprile (“he had balls the size of an Irish broad’s ass”), which incites Jackie Junior and his friend Dino to take down a card game run by members of his own crew.

Both Tony and Ralph know Jackie has to die after shooting at Furio and Christopher, Made Men, but neither wants to give the order.

“I want to give the kid a pass” Ralphie tells Tony during the fallout, who shrewdly says:

Well, I think you should go with your instincts on this… I'll make sure they respect your decision because I'm sure your gonna do the right thing, that's why I made you a captain. The one thing you cannot do is blame yourself. You took this kid under your wing, you schooled him as best you could, didn't you?

Jackie is gunned down.

What kind of man kills the son of a woman he is in a relationship with? Yet even that somehow pales in the face of the true depth of solipsism we witness in the aftermath.

Moments after Jackie’s murder, we see Ralphie on the phone to the Ro, apoplectic about the mooted price of repairs to his car as she deals with the garage. Vito, who did the hit, enters and gives him a nod to say it’s done.

“No, forget it” Ralph says to her, in what seems a rare display of - relative - kindness. “Are you sure?” she asks. “What the fuck did I just say?” he screams back at her.

He’s disinterested at Jackie’s funeral - head in a sports documentary as Ro wails behind him.

“Ro, with the boy,” he complains later. “I can’t get any sleep (shakes his head). It’s incessant.”

Then, sobbing in the midst of a breakdown following another death, this time her friend Karen Baccala, Ralph cruelly dumps Ro for Tony’s sister, Janice (who first linked up with him in the bathroom at her brother’s house, whilst Ro sat oblivious at Sunday dinner).

Tony, eventually forced to confront what kind of man he does business with, consciously and sub-conciously trying to manoevre his own way through a complex web of loyalty and interpersonal violations indexed by the masculine imperatives of their order as he seeks to steal Ralphie’s latest girlfriend, and furthermore, pepped up by his new-found psychological insights from Dr Melfi, eventually runs his own brand of diagnostic investigation. Paying his ever-venal and opportunistic sister for information about their sex life.

Tony: You ever think Ralphie is weird about women?

Silvio: I don’t know Tone, he beat one to death over… I forget, what was it again?

“He bottoms from the top” says Janice, who we’ve already seen dominating him in the bedroom in her inimitable way.

In fact Janice, marvellously portrayed by Aida Turturro, is one of two women to exact a gender-revenge on Ralph. At the dawn of a desperate lunge for newly widowed Bobby Baccala, her therapist suggests she let her current boyfriend down with all the “compassion and respect you’re famous for.”

So Janice erupts at Ralph for forgetting to take his shoes off and viciously kicks him down the stairs.

Christopher’s girlfriend Adriana La Serva also - wonderfully - puts him in his place when he treats her with disdain in the office of her own club, the Crazy Horse.

“As my dearly departed mother used to say” Ralphie drawls by way of a half-hearted apology as he stuffs a bill in her pants “you catch more with honey than you will with vinegar.”

“My mom always told me not to let yourself be talked down to by losers” deadpans Ade in response, as she throws the money back at him, “says you can tell everything about a man by the way he treats women.”

But it’s Herman Rabkin aka Hesh who puts the zap in zinger….”Tell that midget not to be shy with the whip” Ralph orders the trainer to a race horse he has just bought.“If only his mother had taken the same advice” retorts Tony’s Jewish associate.

One of the many things that makes the Sopranos intensely watchable, and infinitely re-watchable, is the humour in it. Ralphie almost sparks a war with New York for a remark about Johnny Sacks’ horizontally challenged wife, Ginny, who he quips “had to have a 90-pound mole removed from her ass.”

Which finds its way to Paulie Gaultieri, who, mad with envy already after several of Ralph’s stunts (including setting up mock phone calls from the boss to inflate his importance) and in jail on a weapons charge, divulges the joke to an incandescent Jonny Sack.

Ralphie reasons it out, and prank-calls Paulie’s mother at her nursing home to take his revenge.

Ralph: Hi, this is detective Mike Hunt Pennsylvania Police Department you have a son Peter Paul?

Nucci Gualtieri: Oh my God what happened?

Ralph Cifaretto: His alright ma'am but I'm afraid he’s in a little trouble. We found him in a men's room in Lafayette Park, I don't know how to put this delicately, he was sucking a cub scout's dick.

It’s another headache for Tony.

But even with all that, and despite Jonny Sack’s (a man so repulsed by Ralph he can’t even be in the same room as him) full-blooded insistence on lethal retribution, mole-gate is not what kills Cifaretto.

The act that culminates in Tony and Cristopher chopping Ralphie up, wig and all, is for him to violate one of the few inviolables in Tony Soprano’s moral life - he kills an animal.

A horse, in fact.

The path leading up to this point is long and full of shifting degrees of dominance and disrespect.

Ralphie invests in a racehorse, Pie O My, and Tony shows a knack for tactics - urging trainer and jockey to hold her back after several failures leading the field.

Ralph: Fuck this horse-whispering shit.

It pays off. Literally.

Cue Ralphie’s mounting chagrin as he’s bade to hand over stacks of cash following Pie O My’s win. His throat constricting with every passing second as Tony holds his hand out until he’s satisfied he’s got his due.

This happens again, and again.

But nothing in the Sopranos is ever one note. We realise Ralphie may not even be a full psychopath, perhaps just borderline, exacerbated by industrial quantities of cocaine.

After all, his breakdown when his son Justin accidentally takes an arrow through his heart and is paralysed for life whilst his father is in the bath, is traumatic. He becomes a piteous figure. Disgustingly repentant, as he sobs in front of Father Intintola.

Emotional. Broken. And yet still vicious.

Pie Oh My, who Tony rescues after she gets ill, is then mysteriously killed in a fire.

And Tony knocks on Ralphie’s door…

Tony: Jesus Christ, you did it. You cooked that fuckin' horse alive!

Ralph: No, I did NOT! But so what?

Tony: So what?

Ralph: It was a fucking animal! A hundred grand a piece! My kid's in a fuckin' hospital! I don't hear you complaining though, when I bring you a nice fat envelope, you don't give a shit where that comes from! Don't give me that look! It was a fucking horse! What are you, a vegetarian? You eat beef and sausage by the cartload!

Anyone who’s seen Pantoliano in films like Bound, the Matrix, or Memento will recognise much of the swaggering cuntiness and warped pyscho-sexual energy. The mordant humour. Even when he’s playing good guys in films like Bad Boys or The Fugitive, his characters are memorable and worth the entry price alone.

And in Ralph Cifaretto he delivered a villain for the ages, one who will shock, horrify and have you laughing despite yourself.

In the words of the man himself, “Ralphie wasn't a character you loved to hate, but a character you hated to love.”

Amen to that.