The first thing The Godfather Part III gives you is the colour of regret. Gordon Willis floods the screen in burnished gold and church-window amber, the light of candles and old money, and into it walks a Michael Corleone gone silver and stooped, his eyes pouched and watchful, accepting a papal honour in a hall thick with incense and velvet. The image is beautiful and it is exhausted, and that contradiction — opulence draped over a dying man — is the whole picture in a single frame.

Francis Ford Coppola conceived this not as another rise but as a reckoning. Michael, sick with the memory of the brother he had killed, wants out of the blood business and into grace, and he tries to purchase it the only way he knows: with a fortune large enough to make the Church look away. He pours the Corleone money into a Vatican-blessed holding company and finds, instead of absolution, a deeper and older corruption — bankers, cardinals, a poisoned pope. Around him a new generation crowds in: his sister Connie hardened into a quiet executioner, his daughter Mary in love with the wrong cousin, and Vincent, Sonny’s bastard son, all teeth and appetite, waiting to become the thing Michael spent the film trying to stop being.

Al Pacino plays the old don as a man arguing with God and losing, the rage of the earlier films banked down into something tired and pleading; his confession scene, half-collapsing as he admits he ordered Fredo’s death, is the rawest acting in the trilogy. Andy García’s Vincent — feral, charming, a switchblade in a tuxedo — earned the film’s only acting nomination and supplies its pulse. Eli Wallach’s smiling Don Altobello and Talia Shire’s flint-eyed Connie fill out a court of betrayers. The famous wound is Sofia Coppola, drafted in at the last minute to play Mary, and the unease around her performance has shadowed the film for decades; what’s harder to admit is how much the picture’s grief still lands anyway.

The Godfather Part III (1990) — *The Godfather Part III* — the original theatrical poster. Paramount Pictures.

Willis shoots Sicily as a landscape of stone and gold dust, the same painter’s instinct that made the first two films look like Rembrandts of crime, and Dean Tavoularis builds a world of cardinals’ apartments and Palermo palazzi that feels carved out of candle smoke. Coppola lets the real world bleed in: the plot is built on the Banco Ambrosiano scandal, the financier Roberto Calvi found hanging under a London bridge, the thirty-three-day pope who died too conveniently — the Church’s own labyrinth standing in for everything Michael can never be forgiven for. Carmine Coppola’s score keeps Nino Rota’s old waltz turning underneath, a melody from a younger, hungrier saga now playing over a funeral.

It all gathers at the Teatro Massimo, where Coppola cross-cuts his son’s operatic debut in Cavalleria Rusticana against a night of assassinations, the music swelling as the killing spreads — the single most ambitious sequence he ever staged. And then the bullet meant for Michael finds Mary instead, on the marble steps, and Pacino opens his mouth and no sound comes out at first, a scream with the volume torn off. It is the cruelest stroke in the whole story: the man who wanted to escape damnation is made to watch it take the one person he loved cleanly. “Just when I thought I was out,” he says earlier, “they pull me back in,” and the film makes a tragedy of the line.

Seven Oscar nominations, not a single win — the trilogy’s only chapter to go home empty, and the only one critics still argue about in bad faith. The Godfather Part III is the lesser film; it is also a real one, over-plotted and uneven and then suddenly, in its last half hour, as moving as anything Coppola made. He knew it himself: thirty years on he recut it as The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone, the title he wanted all along, and the reappraisal it earned only confirmed what was there to begin with. This was never a sequel. It is a man dying alone in a Sicilian courtyard, an orange rolling from his hand, the empire long gone — the saga’s last, sorrowful breath, painted in gold.