This movie was FAR FROM the first English-language movie to use the F word. Movies that were released BEFORE this one which use it include:
Ulysses (1967)
I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967)
Medium Cool (1969)
Tropic of Cancer (1970)
Zabriskie Point (1970)
That Championship Season (1982) - Most underrated movie of all time.
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Of these movies, I've only seen Tropic of Cancer, but according to IMDb, that movie came out in February 1970, while MASH premiered a month earlier (although MASH seems to have gone into wide release slightly later). I have never even heard of Zabriskie Point, but it seems to have premiered a couple of weeks after MASH. I've heard that Medium Cool had this sort of language, and will have to look into it. The other two films are widely (and correctly) cited as having beaten MASH to the F-bomb game, though. MASH seems to have been the first mainstream film to have used it, though, and the one to have introduced it into common use in film (since it wasn't really used in very many films after 1967 - until Painless mouthed off during the football game in 1950s Korea in a 1970 Vietnam allegory, that is).
Fun fact: the only two F-bombs in the novel are both censored with underscores, I believe (something like "mother______"). It might have been dashes, though - it's been a couple of years.
"He kidnapped me! I have Patty Hearst Syndrome!"