where may i find one of these?
Alas, there isn’t one, nor is there likely to be one.
The makers of 3DS Max do not want people using other software with their files. They went out of the way to make it almost impossible.
aww thats so cheep!
You will find other applications also dont support the max format
Max is a proprietary format, but you can ask people to export their models from max to .3ds or .obj, or some other format that blender can import (perhaps collada).
for character animation, imho, try md5 I/O from Der ton.
word!
tested and it works 
the problem is not the format, but the saved data. only the base mesh and the settings from the modifiers are saved. to get the geometry back right you need all the modifiers from max to interpret the data. this means, if there were an import script it would need to emulate every (used) modifier from max. it’d better be called a max emulator script then. 