In a career that has spanned seven decades, his best known roles are that of the barracks chief Hoffy in Stalag 17, and McNulty in the classic Twilight Zone episode "A Kind of a Stopwatch".
In Tora Tora Tora he played Colonel Edward F. French, the officer who responded to the failure to transmit the warning to Pearl Harbor using Army radio to instead use commercial telegraph rather than using the Navy or FBI radio systems.
Erdman appeared as the blackmailing victim, Arthur Binney, in the Perry Mason first season TV episode "The Case Of The Gilded Lily" aired May, 24, 1958.
In 1990 Erdman appeared on the TV series Wings, episode "Around the World in Eighty Years" as Howard Banks.
