Browning returned to Hollywood in 1918 and produced three more films for Metro, each of which starred Edith Storey: The Eyes of Mystery, The Legion of Death and Revenge, all filmed and released in 1918. These early and profitable five-, six- and seven-reel features Browning made between 1917-1919 established him as "a successful director and script writer." In the spring of 1918 Browning departed Metro and signed with Bluebird Photoplays studios (a subsidiary of Carl Laemmle's Universal Pictures), then in 1919 with Universal where he would direct a series of "extremely successful" films starring Priscilla Dean. Universal Studios: 1919–1923 During his tenure at Universal, Browning directed a number of the studio's top female actors, among them Edith Roberts in The Deciding Kiss and Set Free (both 1918) and Mary MacLaren in The Unpainted Woman, A Petal on the Current and Bonnie, Bonnie Lassie, all 1919 productions. Browning's most notable films for Universal, however, starred Priscilla Dean, "Universal's leading lady known for playing 'tough girls'" and with whom he would direct nine features. The Priscilla Dean films Browning's first successful Dean picture—a "spectacular melodrama"—is The Virgin of Stamboul (1920). Dean portrays Sari, a "virgin beggar girl" who is desired by the Turkish chieftain Achmet Hamid (Wallace Beery). Browning's handling of the former slapstick comedian Beery as Achmet reveals the actor's comedic legacy and Browning's own roots in burlesque. Film historian Stuart Rosenthal wrote that the Dean vehicles possess "the seemingly authentic atmosphere with which Browning instilled his crime melodramas, adding immeasurably to later efforts like The Black Bird (1926), The Show (1927) and The Unholy Three. (1925)." The Dean films exhibit Browning's fascination with 'exotic' foreign settings and with underworld criminal activities, which serve to drive the action of his films. Dean is cast as a thieving demimonde who infiltrates high society to burgle jewelry in The Exquisite Thief (1919); in Under Two Flags (1922), set in colonial French Algiers, Dean is cast as a French-Arab member of a harem—her sobriquet is "Cigarette—servicing the French Foreign Legion; and in Drifting (1923), with its "compelling" Shanghai, China scenes recreated on the Universal backlot, Dean plays an opium dealer. In Browning's final Dean vehicle at Universal, White Tiger, he indulged his fascination with "quasi-theatrical" productions of illusion—and revealed to movie audiences the mechanisms of these deceptions. In doing so, Browning—a former member of the fraternity of magicians—violated a precept of their professional code.