H. Rider Haggard's She ["... who must be obeyed"], the novel, was set in the heart of Africa, but the 1930s film moved the setting to the Arctic. What purpose did that serve? What's wrong with Africa?
My only thought is that it could reduce the production costs of the journey portion, enabling easy matte-work, with no trees, boats, or cast other than the leads. In many other aspects, however, they were meticulously faithful to the description from the book. The shifting rock over the chasm that leads to the inner sanctum was exactly how I had pictured it.
Incidentally the movie, now colorized, is fastastically envisioned, with musical numbers! The book itself is marvelous, with well-crafted "ancient writtings" and back-translations to Latin and antequated English. It is discussed in the writings of Freud and Jung as an embodiment of archetypal storytelling, an ideal taken up deliberately in a certain well-loved late-1970s space opera whose name need not be mentioned here :).