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Among other very good movie adaptions are:
John Huston's "The Maltese Falcon". The book was short, but even so, to keep the movie within required length one character (Gutman's daughter) and the book scenes involving her were cut. And Huston used the dialogue from the book virtually unchanged.
"Shane". I saw the Alan Ladd movie a million years ago, and only recently read the book. The book was familiar immediately, which suggests a fairly close adaptation.
The problem with making a movie of a novel is that a big novel, if filmed faithfully scene by scene, would make an interminable series of movies. Far too much material. So the movie has to try to find the essentials, and scrap much of the book.
When they made "A Town like Alice" in the 60s, they used only the first half, the prison camp half, and omitted all the rest.
Another good adaptation was Hitchcock's film of du Maurier's "Rebecca." Wonderfully sinister.
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