The Godfather Part II ends the way no crime film had dared to end: with the man who won everything sitting alone in the cold, having had his own brother killed. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 film takes the empire the first picture built and spends three hours pulling it apart from the inside, and the astonishing thing is that it does this while also telling, in the same breath, the story of how that empire began.

Coppola braids two films into one. In 1958, Michael (Al Pacino) runs the family his father left him — Lake Tahoe, Havana, a Senate hearing — tightening his grip until there is no one left to trust. Against that, in flashback, the young Vito Andolini (Robert De Niro) flees a Sicilian village where the local Don has murdered his family, lands at Ellis Island under a stranger’s name, and builds, favor by favor, the thing Michael will inherit. One man rises; the other rots. The cuts between them are the argument.

De Niro won an Oscar playing the young Vito almost entirely in subtitled Sicilian, without ever sharing a frame with Marlon Brando — the only time two actors have won Academy Awards for the same role. But the film belongs to Pacino, whose Michael barely raises his voice and grows more frightening with every scene he underplays. John Cazale’s Fredo — weak, wounded, fatal — gives the picture its broken heart, while Lee Strasberg’s Hyman Roth and Michael V. Gazzo’s Frankie Pentangeli round out a gallery of men who all, in the end, miscalculate Michael.

The Godfather Part II (1974) — *The Godfather Part II* (1974) — the original theatrical poster. Paramount Pictures.

Gordon Willis shot the two eras in different light — warm sepia for Vito’s Little Italy, a deepening blue-black for Michael’s Nevada — so the film cools as it advances, draining color the way Michael drains himself of everyone he loves. Nino Rota and Carmine Coppola’s score keeps the old-country waltz playing under the modern ruin, and Dean Tavoularis’s sets make 1901 Sicily and 1950s Lake Tahoe feel equally lived-in. It is one of the most beautiful films ever made about ugly things.

The center of it is the kiss. “I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart.” Michael’s tragedy is not that he loses to his enemies; it is that he wins, and the winning costs him his brother, his wife, his children, until he is the last man at an empty table. The first film asked whether Michael could escape the family. The second answers: he becomes it so completely that nothing of him is left.

It won six Academy Awards, including Best Picture — the first sequel ever to do so — and it has been argued against its predecessor ever since, which is its own kind of victory: no other sequel is even in that conversation. Fifty years on, The Godfather Part II is still the film people reach for to prove a follow-up can be not a cash-in but a deepening. It made the saga sadder, colder and larger, and then left Michael exactly where it found the genre: alone with what he had done.