Eddie Lawrence - Eddie Lawrence in The Movies

Eddie Lawrence in The Movies

Eddie Lawrence's film appearances were, at best, an afterthought to his other activities. Between 1968 and 1978, he had small roles in five features, starting with William Friedkin's 1968 recreation of 1920 New York City, The Night They Raided Minsky's. Lawrence was hired when Bert Lahr died midway through the filming schedule of this Norman Lear-produced tribute to the early days of burlesque. Twelfth-billed as Scratch, a baggy-pants comic, Eddie performed the "Crazy House" burlesque routine originally scripted for Lahr: Eddie Lawrence is heard calling for the nurse in Lahr's distinctive Brooklyn accent ("Noice! Noice!"). Three years later, Eddie had a couple of fleeting moments as a Bowery derelict in visionary director Ernest Pintoff's little-seen noir-like oddity Who Killed Mary What's 'Er Name?, filmed on the streets of New York in 1971.

On February 22, 1971, Eddie appeared as a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show (which, until May 1972, was based in New York), performing a five-minute Old Philosopher routine at the end of which Carson was laughing loudly and repeating some of its lines and, in 1974, he was heard as the announcer on a television advertisement for John Lennon and Harry Nilsson's album, Pussy Cats, which also included contributions by Ringo Starr and Keith Moon.

Eddie Lawrence's remaining three films were Blade (1973), The Wild Party (1975) and Somebody Killed Her Husband (1978). Blade reunited him with director Ernest Pintoff, an auteur whose original New York City-based films were considered to have little commercial appeal. The film follows a tough cop named Tommy Blade (John Marley) as he searches for a sadistic serial killer. Eddie has a memorable, though brief scene as a movie producer questioned by Blade. Party was Eddie's sole performing venture in California. In this Merchant–Ivory production which fictionalized the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, Eddie, made-up to resemble an approximation of Louis B. Mayer, played a grimacing movie mogul attending the titular event thrown by Jolly Grimm, the Fatty character, played by James Coco. The film was praised for its period feel, but received otherwise mixed notices and suffered botched editing and other mishandling by the distributor. Finally, Her Husband, filmed in New York by the director of a number of The Twilight Zone episodes, Lamont Johnson, with a screenplay by The Defenders creator Reginald Rose, had Eddie in a semi-comical bit as a neighbor of the titular "her" (Farrah Fawcett-Majors). Despite the creative talents involved, this initial starring vehicle for the most-publicized of Charlie's Angels got generally dismissive reviews, engendering its widely-repeated disparagement, "Somebody Killed Her Career".