Kambei Shimada is the leader of the seven samurai: the first one recruited and one of the only ones who walks away alive at the end. We don't know much about his past before we meet him, except tha...

Kambei may call the shots, but Kikuchiyo is the guy we can't take our eyes off of. He's the outsider in this gang of outsiders, the one who doesn't fit in no matter where he goes. He's plenty crank...

A Samurai in TrainingIf Kambei is Obi-Wan (the crafty old master who no one sees coming) then Katsushiro is Luke: the bright-eyed young kid who thinks the old man is super-cool. Katsushiro comes fr...

After the Big Three, the remaining samurai are a tad more one-note. Their unique traits are summed up more or less as soon as we meet them, and their arcs stay pretty limited in the face of the res...

Kyuzo is the strong, silent type: the kind of guy who shows up in a huge number of American Westerns. He doesn't say much, but he's got mad samurai chops, as we see in the spectacular opening duel...

Gorobei Katayama is another high-ranking member of this little band, helping Kambei organize the resistance and fighting back as best he can. Like Kambei and Shichiroji, he's seen too much and he's...

Heihachi is cut from the same cloth as the other samurai in the film, but he's more accepting of it. He smiles a lot more and goes about his work with a sense of cheerfulness. We first find him cho...

Manzo is one of the farmers who goes out in search of samurai to save his village from bandits. He's not the most enthusiastic about it either, issuing proclamations of doom and doing a heck of a l...

Unlike his colleague Manzo, Rikichi is gung-ho over this whole "hiring samurai" thing, and even if they can't get any samurai, he's all for fighting it out himself. "Without the barley, we'll die a...

Every village needs an elder and Gisaku is the go-to guy for this one. He's incredibly old, for starters, which means he's survived a lot and lived to tell the tale. Rikichi may be pushing to fight...

Like so many characters in this movie, Shino is defined by her relationship to others. She's Manzo's daughter, the one he wants desperately to protect from the samurai he asked to help them, and of...