The film purporting to bear this title and reviewed here is quite patently not Boxeur par amour of 1910 which is in fact a typical formula comedy (the "par amour" films all had the same form) where Max is in love with the daughter of the boxing champion Jack Jeffries (presumably based on US boxer Jim Jeffries). The daughter is herself a good boxer (I do not know who played the part because the film is in all probability lost but it would be fascinating to know) and Max has to beat her in the ring in order to win her hand (there being three other rivals). Max deftly defeats the competition (all knocked out) by relying on his power to kiss rather than on his power to punch.
This, quite clearly, is not the film we have. This film is just a publicity-film made in the US. Since it includes Maurice Tourneur and the actress Hope Hampton it was probably made in 1921 (when Hampton acted for Tourneur in The Bait, made by her own production company under the aeges of Paramount).
Max was at this time looking to establish himself in the US since the miserable state of the French industry after the war gave him little scope at home. Maurice Tourneur was the most distinguished expatriate Frenchman in the US with a well-established career there. Charles de Rochefort, who had frequently acted with Max in French comedies, was also toying at this time with a US career (he appeared in The Empire for Diamonds for yet another expat, Léonce Perret, in 1920).
Max's had already made three films for Essanay during an earlier visit to the US (Max Wants a Divorce and Max in a Taxi are both extant). His first US films after his return visit, the short Be My Wife and his first feature, SevenYears' Bad Luck, both came out in 1921 and are amongst his very best work.
In 1922 he would produce his superb parody of The Three Musketeers, called rather clumsily The Three Must-Get-There's in English but more neatly L'Étroit mousquetaire in French. He and Fairbanks were friends and have in some ways a very similar comic style; the parody follows the original very closely and is arguably the better film.
Far from being a spent force, Max was on top form in the twenties, returning to Europe after this to make films with Abel Gance (another parody)in France and Édouard-Émile Violet(Der Zirkuskönig in Austria, evidently seeking to diversify into more dramatic roles. He was evidently keen to convince the US of his athleticism at this time because he also appears doing press-ups in the 1922 edition of Hollywood Snapshots.
Then, alas, came the meeting and marriage with a teenage girl, the bouts of paranoid jealousy and the double-suicide of himself and his wife in 1925. A terrible loss of a great actor who is was in no way just some kind of prelude to Chaplin (who was obviously influenced by Linder but whose style is quite different) and an actor still rarely appreciated today at his full value.
