This was one of the fights I watched last night. I had researched Nilles and had found him to be irrelevant to boxing in the long run(unless you're French perhaps). However, for the first four rounds it was rough, evenly contested match. However, Carpentier was in top shape and condition in my opinion. His punches were everything you could ask for: powerful, quick, and accurate. Carpentier was the better man in or out, yet Nilles still made a pretty close fight of it. However, I gave every round to Georges. To start the fifth Carpentier and Nilles were tied up, and Nilles collapsed. It seemed to be a slip, but Nilles was down for quite a while, and so I went back to watch the context of the knockdown. It really wasn't much. Carpentier hit him with two mediocre rights to the body. I guess Nilles was so tired by this time that it wouldn't take much. Carpentier came out real fast in the 8th, decked Nilles (with a left hook I think?), and the fight was over. Verdict: Decent, tough scrap. Not a classic.
The outstanding aspect of this one is the excellent filming for 1923. I have read that French and British newsreels and still photography were far better back then than American, and off what I see here it might well be true. As for the fight, Nilles was a low level trial horse for his career. He seems to have been doing pretty well around this time. He had beaten an old Frank Moran and would soon beat a young Larry Gains. Nilles was bigger than Carpentier, but not so much so that the size differential was striking, as it is in so many other early filmed fights. The sixth round knockdown was rough and seemed to come out of nowhere, but there looked to me to be strong right to the ribs from Carpentier. The KO in the eight was impressive. Overall, worth watching for me because the film is so good and there is so much of it. Too bad the Leonard-Tendler film isn't of the same quality.
