In the 1974 film "The Front Page", Benedict appeared as Plunkett, the emissary of the governor. In Dino De Laurentiis' "Mandingo" (1975), he played a slave trader opposite James Mason and Perry King. In the movie "The Goodbye Girl" (1977) starring Richard Dreyfuss and Marsha Mason, Benedict played the stage director of a production of "Richard III" in which Richard III was to be portrayed as a stereotypical gay man. He was the patiently eccentric butler in Dr. Necessiter's Gothic-castle apartment in "The Man With Two Brains" (1983), and had a short scene in the mockumentary "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984), playing Tucker Smitty Brown, the awkward desk clerk who checks in the band. Called a "twisted old fruit" by the band's manager Ian, he replies, "I'm just as God made me, sir."