The ‘silver’ in ‘silver screen’ is a throwback to the days when black-and-white was the norm, silver being the photosensitive metal in film emulsion. The ‘silver screen’ generally applies to movies made before about 1940 (when colour began to dominate), and to the increasingly archaic style of that era. The term sometimes applies to the whole picture business, and the ethos of publicity, and so there is a suggestion of fraudulence with the fun — David Thomson