Arnold reportedly did not care much for the score he composed for David Lean's epic film. He was not given what he considered adequate time to do a good job. In a bit of irony, he won his Academy Award for this score.

The story is essentially an allegory about the senselessness of war. Based on a historical event, the story concerns a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp where a group of captured British officers are forced to build a railroad bridge intended to allow the Japanese to ship troops and military equipment to the Burmese coast of the Indian Ocean. This was doubly a violation of the laws of war: officers are not supposed to be subject to performing labor as POWs, and no POW is supposed to be forced to perform actions in direct aid of the military efforts of his own country's enemy. Once the senior British officer (Alec Guinness) capitulates to Japanese coercion and orders his men to build the bridge, he gains an emotional investment in completing the momentous project (in effect, rooting for the enemy). Meanwhile, an escaped prisoner (William Holden) gets word of the construction back to British headquarters on Ceylon. He leads a demolition team back to the site, where they destroy it just as the first troop train is passing over it.

The score is a piece with strong, violent contrasts, with passages depicting the brutality of the prison camp guards as well as the sweeping grandeur of the location settings. It includes, of course, the famous "Colonel Bogey" march, which was written in 1914 by Kenneth Alford. The British troops whistle it as a token of their defiance as they are marched into the camp; by 1942 this jaunty tune had acquired a set of lyrics, known to all British servicemen, that disparage the masculine equipment of various enemy leaders. The original soundtrack recording of the score (aside from revealing sonic weaknesses of the original studio recordings) also confirmed Arnold's sense that there were weaknesses and repetitions in the complete score. A later concert suite serves the salutory purpose of showing that even so, there was a considerable amount of first-rate music in it.

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