There are certain things viewers can be fairly confident they'll see when they sit down to watch a Martin Scorsese movie. There's a good chance there'll be some kind of violence, for one, and a decent chance it'll be gangsters committing those acts of violence. There'll probably be fast-paced edits as well as great soundtrack choices, and overall, viewers are almost guaranteed to get something good or even great, given how consistent Scorsese is as a filmmaker.
One other thing that's likely to be found in a Martin Scorsese film is profanity. The characters in his films are often unafraid to express themselves in frequently crude ways, and as such, the filmography of Scorsese is a cornucopia of swear words. The following Scorsese films are his most profane when judged by the number of F-bombs, and are in ascending order from least to most F-words.
10 'Shutter Island' (2010) - 19 F-words
Shutter Island was something of a change of pace for Scorsese. He'd made character studies, psychological dramas/thrillers, crime movies, and historical dramas, but few of his movies made before Shutter Island could be classified as mysteries. That changed with this 2010 film, which followed a U.S. Marshall investigating the disappearance of a murderer from a high-security psychiatric hospital.
It's a good film, if not quite one of Scorsese's very best. Similarly, it boasts a respectable number of F-words, at just under 20, but that certainly doesn't put it anywhere near claiming the title of the most swear-heavy Scorsese flick.
9 'Bringing Out the Dead' (1999) - 23 F-words
Boasting an excellent Nicolas Cage performance and a consistently tense narrative, Bringing Out the Dead is easily one of Martin Scorsese's most underrated movies. Even if the plots are very different, it sort of does for ambulance drivers what Taxi Driver did for taxi drivers, being a psychological thriller that gets inside the head of a paramedic who experiences a series of stressful nights working in Manhattan.
Given how high-intensity the movie is and how stressed out its characters tend to be, it's surprising that Bringing Out the Dead only has a couple-dozen F-bombs in the end. It's probably a little more than the average movie, sure, but with the premise and Scorsese being behind the camera, viewers would be forgiven for expecting at least a few more.
8 'Taxi Driver' (1976) - 33 F-words
Standing as one of the most psychologically intense movies of all time, Taxi Driver is intentionally confronting and uncomfortable for much of its runtime. It delves deep into the mind of its protagonist, Travis Bickle - expertly played by Robert De Niro - a Vietnam veteran who's troubled by insomnia and a lack of human connection, so he starts driving taxis for something to do.
It's a film that sheds light on the seedy underbelly of New York City during the 1970s, with various shady people making up much of its cast. As a result, many of them are unafraid to speak in pretty crude terms throughout Taxi Driver, with the dialogue including approximately 30 F-words (it's hard to hear a few lines of dialogue here and there, so the total number could well be more).
7 'Mean Streets' (1973) - 49 F-words
Martin Scorsese wasted no time in establishing his love of characters who swear, given Mean Streets was one of his very first feature films and contained a good deal of profanity. It's a movie that's light on plot but heavy on style and character, centering on a group of young men whose lives are entangled with petty crime and other low-level criminals.
Similar to Taxi Driver, it's hard to decipher all the dialogue in Mean Streets, seeing as the characters mumble fairly often and at least some of the dialogue was improvised, and therefore a little unclear. There are just under 50 confirmed F-words though, which is a pretty sizable number considering the movie's less than two hours long.
6 'Raging Bull' (1980) - 114 F-words
Even though Raging Bull isn't a crime movie, it ends up being just as brutal and hard to watch as many of Scorsese's gangster flicks. It follows a violent protagonist - based on real-life boxer Jake LaMotta - whose professional career involves getting in intense physical fights. Problems arise when LaMotta fails to keep his temper contained to the ring, which eventually leads to him tearing apart his personal and family life.
LaMotta is a brutish guy when it comes to his behavior and his language, and his brother Joey - played by the frequently profane Joe Pesci - shows that said language runs in the family. Released in 1980, Raging Bull was the first Scorsese movie to crack 100 F-bombs in its dialogue, and certainly far from the last...
5 'The Irishman' (2019) - 136 F-words
One of the main things explored in The Irishman is how harrowing getting old is, especially when you've lived a life full of things you regret doing. The film centers on Frank Sheeran, a hitman who's looking back on his life with despondency at the end of his own, and thinking about how he lost various friends and alienated himself from his family.
However, The Irishman also shows that old age doesn't slow criminals down when it comes to how much they swear. Though it's not the most profanity-laden of Scorsese's crime films, it still manages to accumulate well over 100 F-bombs across its lengthy 3.5-hour runtime.
4 'The Departed' (2006) - 237 F-words
The Departed represents the point at which Scorsese movies start to explode, as here, there's some sort of profanity in seemingly every sentence or two. It's a movie where many of its characters are stressed out just about the whole time, given it focuses on a criminal who's infiltrated the police force, and a police officer who manages to go undercover and infiltrate the criminal's gang.
So begins a game of cat-and-mouse complete with plenty of violence, tension, yelling, and swearing. The actors all get to let loose when it comes to F-words, as there end up being close to 250 of them within this one movie. With a 2.5-hour-long runtime, there ends up being more than 1.5 "f**ks" per minute on average.
3 'Goodfellas' (1990) - 300 F-words
Goodfellas plunges viewers headfirst into living in the mafia, highlighting how the mobster way of life attracts people before showing the ways it can lead to a person's downfall. It's told through the eyes of Henry Hill and his wife, Karen, the former a low-level member of the mob who'll never be a true made man, and the latter a complete outsider to the lifestyle. Both provide unique points of view into organized crime in America.
It's an iconic gangster movie that's also helped establish - at least in pop culture - the idea that mobsters swear non-stop. Goodfellas ends up hitting 300 F-words, which is an impressive feat for a movie that's less than 150 minutes long. Much of that swearing is courtesy of Joe Pesci, who definitively proved here that few actors have ever been as good at swearing as him.
2 'Casino' (1995) - 438 F-words
Given Casino is an exceptionally long movie - almost exactly three hours - it has a little extra room to cram in some additional F-bombs. It ends up working in a truly staggering amount: well over 400, which means it comes close to having an average rate of 2.5 per minute.
It's hard to think of a character in Casino who doesn't swear. Its cast is made up of high-strung and often very nasty people who battle for control of Las Vegas during the 1970s, which was a time when the mob all but ran the city through its famous casinos. It's a brutal film with relentless violence and profanity, meaning it's probably not a good one for the faint of heart, or for those who tend to find swearing offensive.
1 'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013) - 569 F-words
With 569 F-words in a movie that runs for about 180 minutes, The Wolf of Wall Street comes close to having an average of three F-words every minute. The profanity never stops, and neither does the debauchery and drug-taking, given it's a movie that's all about excess and the restless desire its characters have for wealth and power.
For a short time after its release, The Wolf of Wall Street even contained the most F-words out of any non-documentary feature film, being beaten in 2014 by Swearnet: The Movie. Still, it remains right up there as not just one of the most profane Scorsese movies but one of the most profane in overall cinema history.