A significant chunk of soundalike movie titles involve the phonemes in “night” or “knight”! In a few cases, when there’s more than one movie with the same title, I’ll just describe the most interesting one.
Night and Day is a wildly fictionalized Cole Porter biopic with Cary Grant as Porter. It makes no mention of Porter’s homosexuality—not surprising since it came out in 1946, when such was forbidden by the Hays Code. Knight and Day is an action comedy featuring Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz, two reliable actors in the kind of formulaic movie that had twelve different writing credits.
Night Club stars Ernest Borgnine, Natasha Lyonne, and Mickey Rooney. It’s about friends putting themselves through college by setting up a nightclub in a retirement home. Knight Club follows a wannabe actor turned bouncer. And…apparently there are gangs of Hollywood bouncers, and you’ve got to weigh your loyalty to your bouncer tribe against getting a better salary? It’s kind of confusing.
(Couldn’t find a trailer for Night Club, but here’s a chat with the director…)
Night Moves is a Gene Hackman detective story about a runaway, an aging star, a stuntman, a mechanic, and the kind of bleakness that only 1970s films could really deliver. Knight Moves is a thriller about a chessmaster who’s a prime suspect in a series of grisly murders…it’s kind of goofy and dumb, but relentlessly suspenseful and entertaining.
Honorable mention to The Night Riders and Knightriders, one little “the” away from being a fourth pair. The Night Riders is a John Wayne hooray-for-the-good-guys Western based on a real historical villain. Knightriders is a George Romero film nothing like George Romero’s usual recipe: it’s a personal drama about a traveling troupe of Renfaire performers.