In "Memoirs of a Professional Cad," Sanders recalls an early movie called "Lancer Spy" in which, he writes, "I wore a monocle to some effect. As a result of this, when my next role came along, that of a pirate in a thing called 'Slave Ship,' I was again called upon to wear a monocle. It was useless for me to protest that at the time of this particular story monocles had not yet been invented. Such pedantry made little impression on the film's producer, and I duly became history's first monocled pirate."

One can scarcely blame the film's producer for making use of Sanders' capacity to carry off Cyclopean eyewear, however: as Time magazine noted, Sanders was "the only actor since Erich Von Stroheim and Charles Coburn who can wear a monocle without looking as if he is going to drop it into his soup."