History, according to one theory, is made by great men. Its course, for better or worse, can be altered in an instant by any man. That's the essence of the message that the spirit of John Wilkes Booth conveys to a suicidal Lee Harvey Oswald in Stephen Sondheim's provocative 1990 musical, Assassins. "And all you have to do is squeeze your little finger . . ." Booth croons. "You can change the world." On this day (January 30) in 1948, Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse changed his world by murdering the internationally revered Mahatma Gandhi. Though tried, convicted and executed for his crime, he remains a hero among a sufficient number of Indians to be the subject of a new movie, Desh Bhakt Nathuram Godse (Patriot Nathuram Godse), a documentary aimed at rehabilitating the assassin's reputation at a time of increased nationalism in the world's largest democracy. (Though scheduled for release today, a civil suit has been filed to ban the film from reaching the screen.) To date, Godse has been portrayed in three fictional features. In 1963, just seven months before the assassination of John Kennedy, audiences were offered Nine Hours to Rama, an Anglo-American co-production in which Horst Buchholtz offered a humanized portrait of Godse. In 2000, a Hindi/Tamil-language crime thriller called Hey Ram (Oh, god) treated his story with sufficient taste for it to be submitted by India's government for consideration by the Oscar selection committee for a foreign-language picture nomination. Godse's moment is relived most memorably in the opening scene of director Richard Attenborough's classic historical biography, 1982's Gandhi.